This is a method of organizing photos for the average human with thousands of camera phone photos that would like them decently organized on a computer. It is not for professionals shooting 30 MP raw imags. Though honestly it would probably work for them, too, with slight modifications.
This system is Mac+iOS-focused but the important philosophies are just as applicable to Windows and Android.
Principles and philosophies behind my photo organizing system:
- I don’t want to use a browser cloud interface. It’s okay if the photos are backed up to the cloud, but I don’t want to have to interact with my photos in a wonky browser app
- I want my photos in folders, on my computer. They can be on a home server (or Networked Attatched Storage, or NAS), or on an external hard drive, that’s okay. But I want to be able to browse them on my computer, in folders. That’s because, to me, this is by far the quickest way to find a photo. In my case, I have 250,000 photos. They take up 525GB. They fit on my internal drive. This is ideal because you can then use Spotlight for quick-searching of folder names.
My solution:
- My big epiphany is that I realized that naming photos takes too much time, and it is quicker to throw a photo into a named folder than it is to rename the photo. I do occasionally try and rename photos but it is clear to me that this is one of the largest stumbling blocks of any photo organization system: naming photos takes too long.
