I am trying to figure out a reasonable naming convention for files and folders for my digital photos. Most of the discussion I have seen seems to center on date based conventions, but I don’t see the value of that ...[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179705\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
The value thereof is the fact that this system is simple, reliable, easy to back-up (and to restore in case of calamity), and endlessly scalable---that is, it will fit small, medium, large, and huge amounts of data equally well.
... a pro or semi-pro photographer who might be relating a set of images to a wedding or some other occasion, where I am sure the date is extremely relevant.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179705\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Actually no, the date as such hardly ever is particularly relevant. Instead, it just provides a simple, natural, and unambiguous sorting and discrimination criterion, that's all.
Over time, I had maybe twenty high level folders with names like, Trips, Holidays or Family. Under Holidays, I might have Easter 2006.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179705\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Almost everybody starts out with a system like that---a hierarchical system of folders, named after categories, topics, or events. The problem is: all these systems sooner or later
will fail, no matter how careful you've worked your hierarchy out. They work pretty well for several hundred or a few thousand images, but they don't for tens or hundreds of thousands of images. The main reason is the fact that no hierarchy can be orthogonal---that is, it's impossible to build a hierarchy of folders so that every image will fall into exactly one single possible place within it. For example, if you shot a photo of your kid at Easter while on vacation with your family, will the image go into 'Holiday,' 'Trips,' or 'Family'? This kind of problem will grow exponentially with the number of images. So at some point in time, you will have to reorganize your system, and that's gonna be a
lot of work.
This sort of mechanism allowed me to find most pictures relatively quickly, but I imagine it has limitations when the volume increases (which it has).[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179705\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Exactly.
That being said, knowing the date from a folder name doesn’t seem particularly useful to me…to find my photos in the distant future, I would have to go figure out what day Easter fell on in 2006 to determine where to find the photos ...[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179705\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
No. You'd search for "Easter" and "2006." In order for this to work, you'd need to add these keywords to your image files beforehand. With a tool like Adobe Bridge, this can be done in a blink of the eye. You download your image file from the memory card to the hard disk, remove the obvious failures (optional), add some basic captions and keywords to them, and save them in a folder named by the date (and by the event, optionally, like e. g. "2006-04-16_EasterWithAuntKate"). To retrieve the images later, simply search for the keywords.
In essence this means, your "hierarchy" will be purely virtual. This has many advantages. First, every image file has exactly one place to go: the folder with the appropriate date. Second, you can have any arbitrary number of hierarchies at the same time rather than just one. Third, moving all the data to another (usually larger) physical storage as well as back-up and restore are very easy and straightforward.
... it almost seems like I could stick everything in one big folder and rely on the tool to find a given set of photos.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179705\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
In an ideal world---yes indeed. Unfortunately, the world isn't ideal; we have to deal with things like computer operating systems which allow only so many files and subfolders per folder, with hard disk crashes, with user errors etc.
I am just making a point about the power of the search tools and how little import the folder name seems to have. [...] I guess what I am ultimately saying is that when you do not have a reasonable way to search your images, a hierarchical set of names for folders is helpful, but when you have access to metadata with your software, the naming conventions seem more of a way to enforce uniqueness and the structure serves a much smaller purpose.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179705\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
That's right. The physical hierarchy of folders is basically meaningless. Instead, captions and keywords create virtual structure.
For further in-depth discussion of this topic, I strongly recommend "The DAM Book" by Peter Krogh. There, the author develops a viable system to store, to back-up, and to work with large amounts of images (and other kinds of files which he calls digital assets), and explains in great detail all the hows and whys. I suggest to adopt his system and to stick to it---that's what I did, and boy I'm glad I did. By the way, DAM stands for Digital Asset Management. Highly recommended reading for every digital photographer who has more than, say, 10,000 images to handle!
I have two suggestions:
1) - Stick with what you are doing until you have sufficient reason to change.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179749\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Sorry, but in my opinion that's particularly bad advice! I'd suggest to switch to a competent storage system as soon as possible, because the later you do it, the harder it will be. And sooner or later you
will be forced to do it.
2) - Make sure that any software you use will survive radical reorganizations without having to start over from scratch. Reentering keywords and/or ratings is no fun.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=179749\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Now that's good advice. The point with Krogh's system is: it will survive radical reorganisations. It's desiged this way. And while adding keywords to thousands of legacy image files is no fun indeed, once you did it, you will never be required to re-do it. And switching to another set of keywords doesn't require deleting the old ones.
You may keep your current folder system for the time being (albeit not recommended)---but whatever you do, start adding meaningful keywords to your image files as soon as possible. If you don't want to go through this chore for your old images, at least start doing it for all new images.
-- Olaf