How do you organise your picture archive?

[mogle]

I once structured and organised all my pictures in the following folder structure Year/Month/Day. By cataloguing and embedding the data, I had good control. It meant I could quickly find pictures both by date taken and by searching the different catalogues.
Adding new pictures to the archive is done with the import function.

Short of disk space? I am not a professional photographer. The number of pictures is limited. How size and cost of disk space have developed this is not a problem.

How are you doing it? Do you get a better method?

[mogle]

I find it strange there are no comments on this.

[brajaq]

I store my pictures in folders by year, and month subfolders. Metadata are user to classify them. Some pictures are in a separate folder (I am a collector).

[Regor250]

I shoot RAW+JPEG and files are imported in a year/Month/fileformat folder structure on an external drive, metatagged with Categories/Keywords, Location and people when present are face recognized automatically. My image collection goes back 20 yrs, a little over 120,000. I don't cull right away, not until I process some of them. Never process them all, some get posted in my online gallery. External drive is imaged once a week in a series of incremental, differential and full backups cycle to another external drive. When edited and saved, filenames are generally updated to include the application used in the post processing and the category: Edited, added to the Metadata record. On a regular basis, the Metadata is embedded into the file themselves for future compatibility and reference.

[MrSteveVee]

My folder structure loosely follows my main keyword Hierarchy, for example: Buildings->Castles->Dover Castle or Nature->Birds->Avocet, I am rarely interested in anything date wise so a yymmdd folder structure would be useless to me unless the date (sometimes the year) is of significance as in Pageants-War and Peace->2019
This allows me to find a lot of the main images outside of AcSdee quickly, I use Faststone image viewer a lot. However within AcDsee using Hierarchal keywords that have the same prime structure allows for overlaps of images across several folders plus the keyword Hierarchy is far more complex than the folders covering many more areas so I could have (say) Holidays->Motorhome->Camp Sites->Kloofs both as a folder and a Prime Hierarchy for holiday sets but some of these images may have Scapes->Landscape or Scapes->Seascape associated with them or maybe Transport->Steam->Locomotives if we visited a steam track on holiday
However it is not static. Both my folder and Keyword Hierarchies are always in a state of flux as I often rearrange when I find a particular organisation is not working well.
Hope this helps

[hw3]

How are you doing it? Do you get a better method?

I use the year > month structure, too. The day is usually in the filename, as in <yyyymmdd> <whatever makes sense>.<extension> The rest is handled by ACDSee as there's too many variables like location, subject(s), event, etc.

The conundrum is old scanned photos without a known date. They are stored in a year folder (if that's known), decade (if year's not known), geographic location (if the decade isn't known), or if all else fails in a catch-all Unknown folder.

[AliGW]

I organise by year and month. Other organisation in terms of finding stuff is down to my meticulous keywording. Your file structure does not need to be overly complicated if you use sensible keywords. Just my point of view, of course!

[hectorsm]

Since I migrated from Lightroom to ACDSee, I kept my photos with the same default Lightroom import setting (Year ->Year-Month-Day). I setup the default ACDsee import setting to mimic those same settings. However, I've also done many film negatives scans which do not have dates. For those, I usually keep them in separate folders using a short description of the location or events.

As you, I also rely on the catalog to organize and find photos.

[Brock_K]

I simply used the Year > YYYY/MM/DD - <something relevant> as my folder structure. As mentioned before by many others, when dealing with people, it helps access quickly when not in ACDSee. I have had ACDSee for many years, but never got into the finer points of cataloguing. The introduction of the Face recognition helps me find images of 1 or more people quickly and I recently played with Calendar as part of the catalogue to help pinpoint what I was looking for. I have a lot to explore in better managing photos, but since this is mostly of family, this has for the most part done the trick for me.

My daughter is getting into photo shoots for clients, so I try to learn new techniques mostly to help her out. I am following many threads for users useful techniques.

[mogle]

Thanks, everyone. I don't; think I have made it too complicated. The following folder structure YYYY/MM/DD is enough for me.

Pictures are coming in from different sources. A few cameras, our iPhones, and a set of action cameras. First I import pictures and videos to a transfer directory where I review and delete a whole bunch of pictures. When the pictures are in the transfer folder I add categories and more. A few pictures get modified and improved. I always keep the original. On regular basis, I use the ACD Import function and import the pictures into the main archive.If there are RAW files I like to keep them separate in a sub-folder.

This process works well for me.