Alpha Photography Blog

This may seem like a slightly odd topic, but if you pick up that camera and really begin using it, you’ll find yourself with hundreds of files. Not to mention hundreds of Megabites, and in my case, Gigabites!

Here I’ll give you some tips I’ve found to be extremely useful in managing an ever-increasing mass of photo files, and some of the ways you can externally store your photos.

In the “good ole days” of film photography, you finished a roll of film, took it to the lab for processing and then slotted the photos into an album. You could then label that album and all would be well.

Now, in the age of digital, not all photos are printed and placed into albums, so how do you find the photos you’re looking for, months, and maybe years, after they’ve been taken and saved?

This presents two issues:

1. How to arrange and label the individual files; and
2. How to best store the files, to ensure longevity (so you can bring out the photos for the great-grandkids).

Arranging & Labelling

Firstly, create a folder just for your photos. You can call it whatever makes sense to you, and will continue to make sense in the future. I was extremely creative here and simply called my folder “Photos”.

Business photos

Where you’re conducting, or starting a photography business, splitting your personal and business photography into separate folders is a good idea - then you don’t have to worry about getting your daughter’s 2nd birthday photos mixed in with a client’s wedding photos.

Under the business folder, create a sub-folder for each client, with sub-sub-folders under that for each job you perform for them.

Where there is editing to be done (as there almost always is), I generally have a separate sub-sub-sub-folder for the TIFF files I’m editing, and then another one for the JPEGs I send to the client. Then, if you are required to make amendments, you can make these to the TIFF files, so as not to lose any resolution by editing and saving over the JPEG format.

Clearly, and meaningfully, name each of the folders, and sub-folders. It may even be necessary to organise them in chronological order, based on the dates you performed the services.

Choose whatever makes the most sense to you.

Personal photos

In your personal folder, I have a sub-folder for each ‘thing’ - be it a family event, a holiday, a birthday party, work function…

Again, I have a TIFF folder and a JPEG folder, for the edited files.

But in this case, I generally delete the original JPEGs and the final TIFFs, and just keep the adjusted JPEGs, to save on storage space. I rarely go back and re-edit a photo, and the extra storage space comes in handy. This brings me to my next point.

Photo File Storage

Computers these days have so much storage space, but they do have limits, and eventually you’ll want to upgrade. What will happen then to all your photos?

What if something were to happen to your computer? All your precious memories would be lost (presuming you haven’t printed any images).

Your computer starts to run extremely slowly as it’s hard drive memory is filling up fast.

This is the part of digital photography that I get a little paranoid about - the longevity of file quality and storage. As with many things, there are no guarantees, so I like to cover a few bases when backing up my photos.

Here are some of the storage techniques I use:

• Printing - call me old-fashioned, but I like to pick up a photo album and look at tangible photos;
• CD/DVDs - this is not the most stable of choices, but they’re convenient and don’t take up too much space in the house; and
• External hard drive - I invested in a 300GB external hard drive, and although not foolproof, it is a great way to store all my photos in the one place, and it makes transferring from one computer to another, quick and easy.

So, like any developing technology, there are always complications that come with it, and in the case of digital photography, one such complexity is file storage. This was a brief snapshot of how to better organise your photos, and also to help make sure that they stay around for many years to come.

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