how do you organize your library?

[Fidel Marcus]

Hi guys, I've just installed a new raid setup in my desktop which comprises of 4 hard drives, each pair is set to a mirrored rair array, one for my music & video library while the other is strictly for my photos.
I am going through my entire library of photos and kind of sorting it out and reorganizing it, I'm not sure if I'm just a very messy person or simply having a database of 45,000 photos simply requires a lot of organizational effort.

I find myself spending too much time trying to find the perfect way to create order among the chaos, sure I have transferred images from one hard drive to another ultimately placing everything on this Raid Array I've created but I want to put an end to it & I'm finding myself curious regarding how the rest of you do it, perhaps my method is flawed? I'm not sure, but I figured I might be inspired to find a new more efficient way to organize my large library of images.

So if you like to please share your method and I hope this somehow helps me spend less time finding/reorganizing images and more time post processing.

Thanks in advance

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Mirrored Raid Array

Shoots named and dated by folder

That's as far as I've got

 

[Darren Bradley]

2x2TB external thunderbolt drives. Shoots named and dated by folder. LR Catalog for each client. That's about it for me.

 

[adrian jordin]

Original RAW files stored in folders by shooting date.
Each of these folders has a sub folder for converted Jpeg/Tiffs.

Separate to these folders is a folder for pictures that have been PP'ed. This contains sub-folders on broad subject areas.
Each image is captioned to remind me what and where it is.
Images are also keyworded for ease of searching. (This bit is a work-in-progress)

The whole lot gets backed-up to an external drive at (irregular) intervals.

 

[Lesley Jones]

Someone might like to point out where I'm going wrong, but I can find pretty much any image by name. True... I still have less than 2,000 in Bridge at the moment - digital and some scanned film. I have two top folders, digital and film. Under that digital has four categories, landscapes, nature, people/animals and miscellaneous. The film folder is the same with an extra sub category for the Leica. I started naming my scanned film files and saw no reason not to carry on with digital.

So instead of hundreds of folders with the date of the shoot and perhaps only a few files in each, I have hundreds of files in a few folders. Can anyone spot a potential problem with this? I do use Bridge to add keywords and I have several smart collections to make sub sets.

 

[adrian jordin]

If you had 10 times the number of images you might find the small number of categories a limitation and you might want to subdivide them. If you can always find what you want at the moment, then I don't see there's much of a problem.
If it ain't broke...

The only thing you don't mention is a separate backup, in case of hardware problems. (don't worry I crossed my fingers as I typed that last bit so that I don't tempt fate...)

 

[Pete Askew]

Try MediaPro from CaptureOne. It works well and is easy to organise your images with, without needing to change any existing directory / folder structures.

Camera systems and image software

 

[Lesley Jones]

If you had 10 times the number of images you might find the small number of categories a limitation and you might want to subdivide them. If you can always find what you want at the moment, then I don't see there's much of a problem.
If it ain't broke...

The only thing you don't mention is a separate backup, in case of hardware problems. (don't worry I crossed my fingers as I typed that last bit so that I don't tempt fate...)

Sorry, I didn't mention the back ups. I have one at home and back up every day if I've been busy. There is another off site which is done every couple of months