How to Organize Your Photo Archive
We’ve finally made it to the end of 2020. The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of the past 12 months, see what you accomplished and begin creating new goals for the new year.
This December, I’m embarking on a journey to archive all of my photos and videos from the 10 hard drives I’ve accumulated in the past 5 years. This will include all of my personal and professional work from the last 10+ years (I’ve already found old photos and videos from high school and middle school that are priceless 😂).
I was deciding between two larger hard drive options, the 10TB G-Drive and the 10TB Western Digital Drive. I’ve seen a lot of photographers and videographers I follow use the G-Drives and it seems to have faster speeds for uploading and downloading but I ended up choosing the Western Digital Drive to save some money. I figured I could forego a bit of speed on the hard drives since I intend to use them as archives and not hard drives that I will be actively editing off of. I’ve also had great luck with Western Digital hard drives in the past.
So far, I’m pleased with the speed of the drives. I’ve only been archiving photos up to this point but the speed for transferring gigabites of RAW photos is suitable for me. (Check back for my blog post about archiving video soon!) By archiving all of my photos, I’ll also be able to free up space on all 10 of my old hard drives, meaning I’ll hopefully never have to buy another hard drive to work off of again. That feels a lot more sustainable in the long run, since I was buying a new set of hard drives once a year. All of my hard drives have disks in them, so I would also consider investing in an SSD or two for working off of in the future.
The way I’m organizing my archives are one drive for photos and one drive for video. Within each drive, I’m separating all media by year.
Within each year, I have photos organized into Edits and RAW
Within RAW, I have all photos organized by date to be easily searchable in the future.
And within Edits, I have all photos organized by date, with the addition of some sort of title giving me a clue as to what photos are within that folder. I’ve found in the past when searching for edited photos within a hard drive, I often can’t remember the exact date of the photos I’m looking for but I have a general idea of what I did that day. So having that extra reminder of what kind of photos are in each folder will help me better search for what I’m looking for. In 2018 and 2019 specifically, I challenged myself to take at least one photo every day (it usually ended up being much more), so I have hundreds of folders and photos from both of those years. Having a little extra info in the folder title makes it much easier to find something specific I may be looking for in the future. And then keeping the date as the first part of the title is a great chronological organization tool and it will allow me to connect it to the RAW folder if I ever need the RAW unedited version of the photo for some reason.
As I go through all of my hard drives, I’m marking my progress with red dots.
A red dot means all content in these folders has been copied over to an archive drive. No dot means either the entire folder or parts of it still need to be copied over. On my first few hard drives, I mixed photos and videos together, so this is a really helpful way for me to know what’s left on the drive that needs to be added to the video archive. It’s also helpful to know where I left off from the day before, since this project will likely take me weeks, if not months.
While sifting through all of my old work, I’m reminded of old memories with friends and family, old trips and projects I embarked on, and it gives me a chance to gauge how my work has progressed over the years. I’ve found old videos I made in middle school and high school and I’m reminded of the passion I had for video from a young age. I get to look back on my first photography class in college and how my photos have improved over the last 5 years. I also get to observe the themes in my work that have stuck through the years. I’ve even found old photos that still impress me and I’m collecting them in a folder that I’ll eventually share on Instagram. It’s been fun to reminisce on old times and to indulge in nostalgia. It feels appropriate for this time of year.
I’m hoping that by archiving all of my photos and videos onto two main drives, I’ll be better able to find old photos, videos and projects that I need to access. Usually I have to sift through multiple hard drives because I’m not sure exactly what year this project was from or what month I took that photo. And when one drive runs out of space, I often have to migrate stuff to another drive to make room for a project with a looming deadline, so my work is all over the place. It’s created a big logistical nightmare for me for a while so I’m hoping two main drives, organized to a tee, will alleviate some of that stress. This filing system makes the most sense to me, as of right now. Everyone has different preferences and I don’t doubt my preferences will change over time. Do you have a photo and video archive of your own? How do you like to organize your content? Let me know your organizational ideas in the comments below!