What Goes Around Comes Around

I imagine that there are as many ways of storing photographs as there are photographers.Some create a system that works for them from day one perhaps using only one piece of software to do it. Others constantly change structures, formats or software always looking for the perfect way, but never finding it.

When I first started storing photographs on the computer I just created folders with names that seemed appropriate to the group - "holiday", "day out", "portrait" etc. For a viewer/editor I believe I had something called Photoshop Lite, a very early cut down version of Photoshop Elements.

With the purchase of a more serious digital camera (albeit a 5MP Nikon compact), the folder structure became a bit more logical. For instance, "holidays" was now populated with subfolders like "2005-Woolacombe". These subfolders then became the easiest way I had of finding the shots I wanted - mainly for printing.

In 2008 came my first DSLR and along with it, I purchased Photoshop Elements 6. With the Organiser and ideas from the Internet, I changed the way I stored photos again. The folders became years, the subfolders months and the application of tags & albums helped me to sort and find what I wanted.

The collection grew and grew reaching over 10000 photos in late 2009. This is when I decided to create a couple of "Catalogs". Anyone who has used Photoshop Elements will be aware that these are just ways of isolating shots. What did I separate? Well, one catalog was for JPEGs and the other for my RAW files.

It was a number of months after this separation that I began to think I was being too reliant on PSE6 to do my organisation. What if I wanted to change in the future? I had all these folders that were just year and then month. They didn't help me find events and the like that I was looking for. So, all change again; I updated the folders back to an event driven structure - Holidays\2005-Woolacombe.

Along comes Photoshop Elements 9. I don't know if PSE6 had the functionality (I never checked), but I found the ability to view the Windows Folders I had created in the PSE9 Organiser my favourite in terms of organising the photos (use Ctrl+Alt+3  to get this view).
Well, a month or two in to owning, I decided to create another few catalogs. I had one for JPEG, one for RAW and to this I added:

- Archive - to holds stuff I don't really want/need anymore

- Import - to hold my immediate downloads from the camera

- Projects - to hold some separate projects such as slideshows.

I even separated all the photos I had in to their own separate structures. The sub structures were the same so I could tie things together, but I had a lot of folders such as JPEG\Holidays\2005-Woolacombe and RAW\Holidays\2005-Woolacombe.

Guess what, a couple of weeks ago, I thought all this was getting too messy. Having so many catalogs means I cannot find some shots as quickly. In view of the fact that the PSE9 Organiser can show folders, I have now moved all photos back in to one structure and deleted all catalogs other than a general one called "Photos" and the "Archive". This seems to be working the way I always wanted it to, but then you never know. Who knows what I will think in another few months or year!