jims musings

Okay every­one… we’re well into the 21st Cen­tury. It’s time to fig­ure out how to store all that dig­i­tal media.
For most of you, this cur­rently means dig­i­tal pho­tos, but dig­i­tal media means all sorts of stuff, includ­ing audio, video and doc­u­ments. Let’s dis­cuss how to han­dle all this stuff.
Back in the day (the 20th Cen­tury), peo­ple would stuff their photo neg­a­tives into shoe­boxes and stuff the boxes into a closet. Slides– often in carousels– would live in the closet, too. Those ‘Super-8′ movies would also be stuffed in there, per­haps with a pro­jec­tor and screen. Doc­u­ments would live some­where else, usu­ally in a fil­ing cab­i­net or desk drawer. Music was stored else­where, usu­ally with the record player or stereo. Finally, video tapes or (gasp) laser discs would be kept near the TV or player.
In short, things were kept all over, and rarely orga­nized.
Now, with all this stuff con­verg­ing to the PC, it is crit­i­cal to keep it orga­nized. I per­son­ally have about 40,000 images using 280 GB of disk space. This amount of mate­r­ial must be orga­nized.
Thank­fully, the orga­ni­za­tion is sim­ple.
First, you must break out of the Win­dows ‘My Doc­u­ments’ or ‘My Pho­tos’ struc­ture.
On your hard disk, cre­ate a folder to hold your data. I’m a geek, so I named my folder ‘Data.’ You can call it ‘Per­sonal’ or even ‘Sally’ if you’re feel­ing friendly. The name doesn’t mat­ter, but the loca­tion does. It needs to be out­side of the ‘My Doc­u­ments’ struc­ture (so every­body who uses the com­puter can get to it) and easy to find.
Inside of the data folder, I have more fold­ers, each folder being named for a year, like this:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

Within each Year folder, I have more sub­fold­ers which rep­re­sent the dates and events that pic­tures were taken, like this:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
           +- 2009-04-05 Kindergarten play
           +- 2009-06-17 Yosemite Trip
           +- 2009-08-21 Disneyland
           +- 2009-09-03 Cousins Party
           +- 2009-11-26 Thanksgiving
           +- 2009-12-25 Christmas
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

You place your pho­tos and videos into these dated fold­ers. I actu­ally have an addi­tional level, since I have mul­ti­ple cam­eras. Under each dated folder, I have another folder for each cam­era involved, like so:

C:\
   +- Data
       +- 2009
           +- 2009-04-05 Kindergarten play
           +- 2009-06-17 Yosemite Trip
               +- Canon XSi
               +- Canon SD880
               +- Casio ZX-55
               +- Apple iPhone
               +- Processed
           +- 2009-08-21 Disneyland
           +- 2009-09-03 Cousins Party
           +- 2009-11-26 Thanksgiving
           +- 2009-12-25 Christmas
       +- 2008
       +- 2007
       +- 2006

The final break­down may seem unneeded, but it helps keep things orga­nized. My cam­eras do auto­matic file nam­ing, and occa­sion­ally there are name col­li­sions (where the file names from dif­fer­ent cam­eras match). Keep­ing the pho­tos seper­ate pre­vents over­writ­ing pic­tures.
You’ll also noticed the ‘Processed’ folder. This is where I keep pho­tos that have been altered in some way– thus I always have the orig­i­nal.
Hope this helps every­body. This struc­ture keeps my pic­tures orga­nized, allows me to find things very quickly, and makes back­ups easy to do.