Multi photographer folder structure

[Mike Peters]

Bush Telly has thousands of photos contributed by many different photographers

I have read the DAM book which is for a single photographer

What file structure should we use

Thanks

Mike

[peterkrogh]

Mike,
The information you provide is a little thin to make much of a recommendation.

Personally, I would first try to use metadata toe differentiate the images, rather than a folder structure.

You don't say if you use DAM software, or if the images have any tags or naming conventions that would be able to help here.
Peter

[Mike Peters]

Peter

Your book is great!

We have Adobe CS4 + Lightroom. The computers are PC's

I liked your buckets idea. Be good to stick with that. Most of the images currently have very little metadata attached apart from date, camera, lense etc. They are currently organised on a backed up file server into folders like this:

<project>/<photographer>/<date>/<camera assigned file name>.RAW, JPEG, TIF

Its not very useful because the numbers of images are growing rapidly and we need to reuse images on multiple projects.

So I want to go thru using lightroom and rename and reorganise the lot following the plan suggested in your book, and add the missing metadata before it gets really difficult.

Your book don't mention what to do with multiple photographers. So hence my question

Mike

[johnbeardy]

Well, the book does mention using the initials in the filename, which is quite a bit more robust than using folder names. It's very easy, for instance, to drag images between folders in Lightroom and the inclusion of initials would survive. You can also search across foldes for any photographer ("filename / contains / JDB" in a Lightroom smart collection, so this would help in a multi-project environment.

Also I'd add the photographer's name in the Creator field.

John

[Mike Peters]

Thanks John

Work checking first - so I'll give it a go

I think the first step would be to rename them all
<Photographer>_<YYMMDD>_<ExistingID>

Then automate the capture of metadata implicit in the existing folder structure

• Project
• Photographer
• Date

Some have file names like "big tree" or "cabbage tree" - so that also needs to be added to the metadat before renaming the file

Then shift them into buckets

Thanks

Mike

[Mike Peters]

Worked a charm

Took a bit to get my head around Lightroom but it's wonderful to use

So every image was imported over 2 weeks and metadata added.

Then exported into a subject folder like "Canterbury Native Plants" and renamed as  "<Photographer>_<YYMMDD>_<ExistingID>.dng"

There are around 50 photographers stored together.

All images is stored on a network drive which is backed up nightly and stored offsite.

Only annoying thing is Lightroom catalogue not being able to be stored on the network.


Cheers

Mike