Photography 101 - File Organization & Backup (Patreon)

File Organization is a difficult subject to tackle, because it is so heavily dependent on what you are shooting, your personal needs, and your personal preferences.

However, I am going to share my methods of file organization here that have worked for me over time, that I wish I had been able to know at the very beginning. It's a system that has evolved and improved over time, and I find it useful every single time I need to hunt down that one shot.

Folders Folders Folders!

Personally I have always been a big fan of the basic file structure of using folder trees. The reason is because it is the most cross-compatible method when you wind up using many differing programs and systems. For example, lightroom uses a structure called "Collections" which is lightroom's preferred method of file handling. Many people use this structure, but the problem is it causes you to become 100% dependent on lightroom for finding anything you've made. To me it's a bit of a trick Adobe uses to keep it's users from being able to easily switch over to other competitors like Capture One Pro. Further, when you need to find these files within windows explorer so you can save new files to the same path, or upload photos to the internet, they are often in one big jumbled mess and almost impossible to find outside of going to lightroom, then right clicking on the image and choosing "Show in Explorer."

So! Let's kick it off, since my line of work is based on working with different people in different outfits, my folder structure is person based. I strongly recommend avoiding using dates to create folders as a list of numbered folders can be very difficult to parse.

My structure is as follows, numbers represent folder depth:

• Photography
  • Models
    • Model Name
      • Outfit Name
  • Portfolio
    • Model Name
      • Outfit Name
  • Resources

Photography - This is my top level folder which contains all of my photography work.

Models & Portfolio - These are my RAW and "Finished" file folder structures. They are essentially duplicate folder structures. "Models" contains my initial file dump onto my computer of all RAW files taken straight off of the camera. These RAW files are placed into the corresponding subfolders based on what outfits were shot and on whom. "Portfolio" is where I export my finished files to. These are Jpegs which have been color graded, edited, and resized and are ready to be uploaded to the web, such as for you guys here.

Resources - This is where I keep things such as re-usable photoshop files, for example I keep my "Thirds" file where I have a properly sized evenly divided image with columns between that I use for my public posts on patreon. See the post "May 2019 Updates Pt. 5" as this week's example of that file. 

The reason I love this system is that it is easy for me to remember the names of the models I have worked with. At this point there are over 200 models, and I am still able to remember the name of each person I have worked with when looking for their photos. Of course you can use whatever you remember the best, but I can't think of a better way personally. The problem with things like dates or locations is that dates are very abstract and difficult to remember (What were you doing one year ago today? I certainly don't know what I was doing.) and locations stack up since it is unlikely you will be shooting a new location for each shoot you do. But to each their own and if you have your own system you think is an improvement feel free to comment it below! I would love to hear how all of you handle this.

What if my HDD is full?

Recently I ran into a problem when I filled up one of my hard drives, about how I could possibly keep my file structures accessible without having to browse between two folders and try to find older models vs. newer models (since I often shoot with older models more than once.) The solution I found for my windows PC is called "Symlink" - it is a method of linking folders similar to "shortcuts" but the difference is that programs such as lightroom & photo mechanic are unable to tell that these are shortcuts, and therefore the file structure is kept intact!

When moving to the new hard drive, I now put new models into the new hard drive, while creating a symlink for every previous folder from the older hard drive. This "tricks" lightroom into believing the files are on the new hard drive, and I was able to keep all of my files in one singular list. 

Symlinks are a function built into windows and you can create them manually:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

However, I found an extension which adds it into the right click context menu so that they are easy and fast to create:

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

If anyone needs more info on symlinks and how to create them, I will be happy to help, just leave a comment below.

Backup...or else.

If your photos are professionally important to you, it is absolutely vital that you backup your files. It is so easy for something to go horribly wrong and to lose all of your data. I know some photographers who play dangerous with their files, leaving them on SD cards permanently and just buying new SD cards as they fill up. The thing is, SD cards are notoriously bad at keeping data, and will definitely screw you over in the end.

Backing up to your hard drive is of course the first and most simple step, but it is also not enough. It is very important to create redundancy, and the optimal redundancy is an off-site backup of your work. I searched for various methods throughout the years, such as having a separate server at my parents house that would perform nightly backups, to buying cloud space to host my files on. Both of these proved to be prohibitively expensive, difficult to manage, and time consuming.

I wound up coming across a solution called "Backblaze" which does an entire system backup, with encryption included for only $6 a month! The most insane thing about it, is that there is UNLIMITED STORAGE!! They do not care how many gigs you have, they will back it all up! Then, if you lose all of your data, rather than having to download it at terribly slow speeds, they will ship a hard drive out to you for a fee. Then once you have copied the hard drive, you can send it back and they will refund your fee in full. It is an unbelievably good value for what it does and something I would recommend to all working photographers. Further, it backs up automatically as new files are added to your system so you don't have to keep watch on it or anything. This is not an advertisement for Backblaze, merely my own personal opinion of the service. Also, Backblaze is not a storage system for your excess files, do not treat it like an extra hard drive. They will delete any files which are deleted from your computer after 30 days. So just think of it as a mirror of your computer with a 30 day timeshift function built in.

Also they have a vacation mode, so if your computer disconnects from the internet, it will consider you in "vacation mode" and will hold onto your data for up to 6 months. Again, this is not a cloud service and is not a good way for you to offload data so that you can free up some hard drive space. It is merely a backup of all things you keep on your computer, and the hard drives you wish to keep backed up must be plugged in within every 6 month period to keep them on file with Backblaze.

That's the basics on file organization and backup, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please leave them below or send me a message on patreon if it is more personal.