How do you organize your photos?

Okay...feeling a little overwhelmed by this. ; Right now, I have all of our photos on the computer in Aperture and am just beginning to actually learn to use it. ; But I feel like I have all my photos tossed in a box in a jumble (figuratively speaking..you know what I mean?) and I'm finding it tough to even find what I shot over the last 5 years, unless it is associated with a certain month..like Christmas, or our usual WDW trips. ; It's a mess. ; It's funny, because in real life, I am the most organized person you will ever meet, but in my cyberlife...oy! ; What a disaster! ; (you should see my iTunes account - yikes)

Where do I even start getting this organized folks? ; Help!

 

Smart Albums in Aperture are you friend. Especially, if you only have one ore two aperture libraries. ; You could Create a smart album for each year. Include other criteria as you may need need such as occasions or even specific import dates.

 

I use a system similar to Justin's, but using a strictly chronological system.

Under My Pictures, I have a folder for each year. Under the year's folder, I have a folder for each day when I took pictures. Since I don't shoot much (compared to some around here!), most years only have 20-30 day folders in them.

After taking pics, I copy them from the camera into a Downloads folder. I then copy them into their proper day folder under the current year. This gives me an untouched copy of the pics, in case something goes wrong during post-processing.

Post-processing on the pics includes renaming (my standard date format is yyyy-mm-dd_###.jpg), then batch processing in Photoshop Elements for color correction and sharpening, then noise reduction with Noise Ninja.

Once the pics are processed, I back them up to my online photo storage AND two laptops. Only then can I clear my memory cards and delete the untouched version in Downloads.

After the pics are processed and backed up, I manually add a line to an index that I keep, so I can look up the pics later by subject or location.

Indexing can be done in many ways; if you have a program like ACDSee, you can add comments to each individual photo, allowing the program to automatically locate any pics you might have by keywords. I don't bother with this at the moment, but eventually I'll have to, as I add more and more pics to my collection.

 

I also use a system similar to Justin's. ; I use the windows folder system, but I organize everything by location. ; I have a separate folder for each attraction, show, restaurant, shop, etc that I have taken photos of at WDW. ; For example, photos of POTC would go in:

C:\Photos\WDW\Magic Kingdom\Adventureland\Pirates of the Caribbean

All of the Raw Files stay in the attraction folder, the edited copy is saved as a photoshop file and goes in a sub-folder called "Edited." ; The images are then flattened and saved as a JPEG in another sub-folder called "JPEG"

 

Since you're on a Mac (as am I), I'll tell you what I do.

First off, when I attach a camera or plug in a card reader, my computer is set to automatically open iPhoto.

Then, the photos are imported, and iPhoto is set to automatically separate photos by "event". ; My event criteria are set so that each day's shots are one event. ; After the import, I give each event some name (like "Epcot", or I'll put in the initials of whichever family member is in the shots), that way, I can search my photos without having to have a keyword for each photo -- I just larger groups of photos with whatever I named the event.

Additionally, the events are kept in chronological order, so it's pretty easy to find them if I have some idea of when they were taken.

Finally, when I get done importing (from say, my last trip to Disney), I will create an Album (with a title like "Florida 2009"). ; Then, I drag all my photos from that trip into that album, and delete the ones I don't want to touch up and/or print. ; Then I do the post processing on those photos.

Hope that helps,

Boris