I wanted to stay true to my weekly image and my goal to post every day about my workflow. The result was pictures about my workflow! See below for pictures and descriptions of my folder structure and naming conventions.

As picture totals rise into the tens of thousands, a critical part to effectively storing, backing up and retrieving photos is organizing and naming them properly.

Note: Lightroom helps facilitate organizing and naming the photos properly (I know I keep mentioning Lightroom-I’ll dedicate one post this week on just it).

Another Note: As with other parts of the workflow, these are my preferences and may not suit everyone. Naturally, I’ve found it to work very well and highly recommend it, but there are certainly other ways to go. The most important part of the process is to follow it religiously. Without rigid consistency, pictures become lost and time is wasted determining what the photo is and where it fits into the bigger picture.

Folder Structure

I organize my pictures into two primary folders - personal and business. I then break them down into subfolders as shown below. I then break each of those areas into what I search for most frequently. This could be done many ways, but I’ve found that by client makes the most sense for the business and by the year makes the most sense for my personal folders.

Next, the structure is broken into individual shoots. I start with the year name, then a two digit month and then a description of the shoot. This automatically sorts folders chronologically and creates a lot of consistency in scanning down through the lines, making finding a particular shoot during a particular time very easy.

Naming Conventions

As you can see, my file names are named similarly to the shoots. The only addition is a counter at the end of the picture. It increments for each new photo from the shoot. This allows me to very easily match up any exported photos back to their original shoot, understanding who/what the shoot was for and when it was done - all by a quick visual scan.