Storing your Photographs

I don't know if you'll be interested in this or not as we all have our own ways of dealing with our photographs. The way I handle my photograph storage is as follows:

Every set of photographs is saved in its own folder as per:

2020_November_17_St_Matthews_Preston

Every photograph is renamed in sequence as in:  AJC_008765. As I shoot both in RAW and JPEG both identical images will have the same file name/number.

Under the main folder there are a number of sub-folders, listed as:

JPEG_from_Camera - where I put all the (re-named) JPEG images directly from the camera.
DNG  -  Each RAW file is also converted to the DNG format using Adobe Digital Negative Converter (this is a free program you can download and install). I now have two RAW files - CR2 and DNG to work with if needed.

I then process all the RAW photographs contained in the main folder using any RAW processor. The RAW (CR2) files are kept in the main folder.

Once processed, I convert all the processed RAW files into both TIFF and JPEG (max quality) formats and place them in their own (sub) folder:
TIFF
JPEG
under the main folder

In some cases I also have a Video sub-folder for storing video clips.

If I process the files for use online, I'll also have a sub-folder labelled: for_WEB_use
I might even have a sub-folder labelled JPEG_Small  if I've re-sized them.

ALL these files are stored on at least TWO separate external hard drives, so if one fails I still have a full set of images.

I also store many of them online too - I have more than 86,000 images stored online.

This would be a typical file structure:

As you can see, there is no video sub-folder in this case. There are some extra sub-folders too for Panorama photographs.  You will also notice that each image has its own .xmp file. This is the file your image (RAW) processer makes when you edit the image so it tells the program what changes have been made to the original.

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