Ask Jim

from Photo Insights Oct. 2022

Subject index

Every month, Jim will answer a question from his online students, from people who participate in his tours and workshops, or from subscribers to this magazine. If you have a question you’d like Jim to answer, please drop him a note at photos@jimzuckerman.com.

Q: Jim . . .My question is about workflow, specifically your file organization structure. How do you name your image files and what kind of directory structure do you create to store them in? I see examples of everything from filing using folders dated by year with monthly sub-folders to filing by the types of photography shot. I would think it would be time consuming to go through each year to find a specific shot should you not remember the exact date. I can also see the downside of using specific type folders (should a shot of your wife taken in Mexico be filed under Family, Travel, Mexico, etc...). Of course either system can use keywording but that can be time consuming as well.

I have several years of Lightroom mess to clean up and need a solid, efficient plan moving forward. Any helpful advice is greatly appreciated! Doug Goss, Clarksville, Tennessee A: A lot of people ask me this question. First, never ever organize your images by date. They will be very hard to find, and in the year 2022 it won’t matter if you took a particular landscape in 2012 or 2013. You won’t care. If you need the specific date of a picture, that information is in the metadata.

I started my system before Lightroom became available to us, so I never used it. I organize my images by subject. I created a hierarchy of folders. For example, I start with a folder called Photo Library. Then I made major subfolders based on what I shoot: Nature, Travel, Women, Americana, etc. Inside Travel, for example, I created more subfolders: Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, Antarctica, Oceana, etc. Inside the Europe folder, I have: France, UK, Germany, Poland, Italy, etc. Inside France, I have Paris, Lavender fields, White Horses, etc. -- again, based on what I shoot.

If I want to find my leopard folder, here is the pathway I use: Travel > Africa > wildlife > leopards. If I want to locate the folder of Balinese dancers, here is the pathway: Travel > Asia > Indonesia > Bali > dancers.

I acknowledge that a flaw in my system is I don’t keyword. I realized years ago I didn’t want to spend endless hours after every trip I took doing that. So, if I want to find ‘birds in flight’, I have to look in several places like Costa Rica, Africa, Antarctica, etc. But I’m not a stock agency, and my visual memory is pretty good. So, my system works for me.