Photo Organizer

I do believe it was classic, however I later switched computers. I did not read the disclosure closely at the time.

The best move I ever made in getting a handle on organizing my VAST photo collection was to quit fooling with "Catalogs"

The main workhorse in my organization is free FastStone (besides a high discipline to be organized in the first place).

A huge help is to never name photos by what they are; name them by Date Taken and a consecutive number; and, file them in a folder TREE that is also purely organized by date.

I first started naming images by camera-date-number as in 7DMkII_14-Jul-2015_047; but later, I decided that, although not quite so easy to read at a glance, there were many advantages to using this naming pattern = Date_Time_Camera_Number as in 2020-05-14_175439_7DMkII_0945; by using this naming pattern, images ALWAYS line up in perfect order of capture, even when mixed with images from other months and years and taken by different cameras.

Once in a while, I come across photos where I have no idea as to the date taken; in which case, I make a best guess as to the year; and, if it looks like winter, it gets January 1st, and summer gets July 1st; to work in my system, they must have a date; so, if I can't determine the correct date, I assign a best guess date.

Once you get the folder dates down to a specific month, then name the folders in that month by FIRST the DATE and then the content/event, such as "18-Sep-1987_Branding at Bob's Ranch"

To keep the folder tree lined up numerically/alphabetically, use the month number; the month names will not line up in order; I use number and name like this "10_October, 11_November"

I use free digiKam to add keyword tags and also to edit and apply GPS data.

Many people use digiKam strictly and it can be used in catalog fashion if you must.

I don't use "stacks" and "version sets"; I tried them and it is only a confusing mess.

What I do is have a whole host of sub-folders for every particular day; all of the RAW are in the RAW folder; the converted from RAW are in their own folder; all the PSD are in the PSD folder; the finished product is in another folder.

Of course, mine is a lot more involved than explained, as I have RAW first landing and not yet converted; RAW that has been converted; and so forth and so on; however, regardless of format or degree of completion, every single image file for a particular day is organized in sub-folders under that day.

With my disciplined system, I can find a single image amongst thousands within seconds.

I hope this helps.

Joe, 

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Sepiana thanks, attempting to download now but waiting for code to update my password.