Photo Organisation Scheme

Someone recently asked me how I currently structure my photo collection. 

 

The short answer - It's a mix of:

* "Structured" stuff for my "proper camera" stuff from 2010 onwards, 

* A similar system for camera photos too this past year and a bit, alongside / integrated

* Haphazard per-device collections for the rest

While I should try to improve this, I have also been burned before, having lost a good few months of stuff (suspected) from one old camera from a botched reorder that I then backed out from...

A longer answer:

My system is:

* photos/

** YYYY/

*** YYYY_mm_dd-SeriesName_OrMainKey-OtherSubject1-Subj2_Keywords

I settled on this approach as the best way of balancing chronological grouping, with keeping them easy to search

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For trips, I currently group them under each year as:

* YYYY_mm-TripNameYY

** <folder names as above>

Downside is finding those amongst all the others though...

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For the past 1-2 years, I've also switched to having phone pics in parallel folders like:

* YYYY_mm_dd-n4-Blah

* YYYY_mm_dd-n9-Blah

* YYYY_mm_dd-s25-Blah

Before, I'd only have them all in big scrambled dumps straight from the "DCIM/Camera" folder, and stored in toplevel folders alongside the year ones, grouped per device. 

That was before I started making more heavy use of phone camera, and needing to keep them close with proper camera ones. That then also motivated my "MediaSlurper" tool for auto grabbing my photos from both phone + camera, and organizing this way. Can now do "single click" downloads, multiple times a day...

Regarding How I Find Stuff

As mentioned above, mostly a combination of trawling by rough date range + searching for relevant random keywords I might've shoved in the titles to get them to show up in such cases.

 

However, there is another way:

For anything I suspect I'm liable to want to generally share eventually, I end up doing a filtering pass to weed out all the non-viable ones, then with the "good" ones, I then do a pass to do a basic edit so they're reasonably ok

Then I upload to online galleries / albums  (i.e. used to be Google Photos, now Flickr) - With many / most actually being private folders even.

Then, periodically, I go through and do a secondary pass adding the best of those to a "Monthly Highlights" album, which then ultimately filters through to a "Highlights of the Year" album.  (That one though is always a lot harder to put together... heck, I didn't manage to do last year's one)

Then, I mainly only look in these filtered folders for the things I want to share, unless I'm looking for something even more specific.

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Having seen how Google Photos does things with all its AI image recognition stuff, I do think (as much as I generally hate AI Shit) that AI-powered search is something that does make sense for strictly localised device-only visual search.

One thing I do lack is the ability to search on general colour ranges (against a crude + blurry guide canvas, and/or with general associated mood queries). DigiKam's UI seems to offer a tantilising "colour search", though in practice, I've never gotten that to work yet

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Something else that's been cool to do is to just filter by videos (since I don't capture that many of those, as they gobble storage space really fast), and start picking random ones. That always yields really interesting + totally random "moments of life" that are so out of context yet end up juxtaposed together, resulting in a fascinating time capsule result such that I end up wishing I'd record more of them. But then, in the field:  "Err... I am running low on storage or battery again!!! 😅"