Organise your photos by date or by theme?

How to organise your photos is a simple question, but one that can be very difficult to answer! Depending on the type of photography you're doing, this can be very simple or very complicated.

Very simple for a photo shot of a wedding or a client, for example. Here, you start with a series of photos (which can be large or small) and once developed, retouched, shared, published or delivered, you can archive the folder of images. A chronological archive with the name of the project and a date may be sufficient.

But how do you organise your photos when you're a nature, travel or landscape photographer? For these photographers, including myself, you need to be able to find any of your photos over the years. Whether it's based on a location, a date, the theme of a series, etc., you need to be able to find all your photos quickly on request to avoid wasting time and losing a contract. Photos that can't be found are in fact lost photos! 😰

In this article, I present my way of organising my photos, which for some may not be suitable at all and for others may provide some key points.. It also completes the article "my photo workflow

First of all, I should point out that I work with "de-rawtisation and cataloguing" software. Capture One Pro. But the principles I'm going to explain here are the same, whatever software you use. If you'd like to find out more about development and cataloguing software I invite you to read this page.

So, back on my computer, after a series of captures, I import my photos as quickly as possible, that very evening! A card mix-up, a card error etc. unfortunately it happens very quickly and to everyone sooner or later! 😱

• In the import window, I'm going through my images to make a first rough cleaning and remove photos that are blurred, badly framed or too under or over-exposed etc... so you get the idea. This amounts to making an initial pre-selection of the photos to be imported. By doing this, I don't waste my time importing photos that will be unusable, and then deleting them.
• I then rename my photos when I import them. For photos of my trip to Norway, I'll use : name of trip or project / year / photo number which gives the following name: norvege-19-001
• I used to add locations in the form of keywords, but now that devices are equipped with GPS this is no longer necessary. However I sometimes add a few thematic details via keywords to speed up my future searches. For example: mountains, forests, macro, blue hour, golden hour, the season etc ...

This is my import method. Now let's see how I organise my folders.

So I classify my photos by main theme and then sub-themes, as you can see in the illustration opposite.

In this section, I'm probably going to surprise a few of you. I know that many photographers sort their photos by date. That's not my case at all. From experience, I realised that this was absolutely impractical for me. 😲

For example, I'm going to create 2 main themes such as "French regions and foreign travel. Then in these 2 themes I'm going to create respectively the list of the regions of France where I made my captures Brittany, Normandy, the Pyrenees, etc.  in the foreign travel section Norway, England, Spain, etc.

Why have I organised myself like this?

In fact, it's quite simple.

1. I always remember the places where I took my photos, but I don't necessarily remember the dates! And when I go to the same country or the same region of France several times, I remember the dates even less.
2. What's more, when I need to find photos, (as far as I'm concerned) I'll be looking for photos of this or that country, or this or that region, or mountains, animals or flowers etc... So classification by date doesn't work for me.
3. Also, when I go to the same country several times, having all the photos taken in the country in question in the same folder gives me an overall view.. To compare my old photos with the new ones, to redo the series over the years, to take the old ones and redevelop them according to my current photographic style..

I would add that in each of my cases, my images are naturally in the order in which they were taken, so by date. Also, if you remember my renaming when importing, in the name of my photos I have the last 2 digits of the year of capture. This means that, even when displayed by image name, they are still chronologically in the order in which they were captured. And even in the Finder for Mac or the file explorer for Windows, the photos are in order.

What's more, all software can display/filter a folder or an entire catalogue in order or by date of capture. All photos have their capture dates embedded in their exifs.

If I were to do the opposite, filter and display simply by location or theme, I'd have more work. (I'd have to manage everything by keyword, which means taking the time to enter them, etc., although now with artificial intelligence, that's less and less necessary, or else make collections by theme, which would double the work).

As you've already guessed, if I want to display my photos about a particular subject or location on a certain dateAll I have to do is click on the date I want while I'm in the folder.

What's more, if I need to create a series, for example of sunsets in different European countries, or to search for my 5-star photos (which means doing a cross-search in different folders), I create albums or collections. (The names vary depending on the software).

To be honest, I make these kinds of albums or collections as I go along when I'm working on my files. So I have albums of my 5-star, 4-star and 3-star photos, of sunsets, mountains etc...

In conclusion, if I'm looking for a precise photo, the filtration is almost already done. I only need a few seconds. No loss of time, no loss of image. Now this is my way of doing things, there are plenty of other ways! 😜 but maybe this sharing will help or inspire some of you.

How do you organise your photos?

If you are looking for software and training to manage and develop your photos I invite you to go there,

Photographically yours,

David