Camera Labs

Hi Everyone,

Please forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, but I am new to the digital side of photography and am having trouble working out how I'm supposed to manage my photo files.

I recently bought a D90 (which I am absolutely thrilled with!) and have loaded the free Nikon Transfer and ViewNX software. No problems with loading the photos into ViewNX, but after that I don't know what to do. I imagine that after I've retouched them and converted them all to JPG format I should move them to another folder and then back them up elsewhere? Or do I leave them in the Nikon sub folder? Or doesn't it matter? And where should the NEF files be kept?

Any suggestions or details on how others manage their photo files on their PC would be appreciated. (Please note, Mac specific info won't help me much!)

Thanks everyone. Trav.

It's mostly up to you. What I do is backup my RAW (NEF) files on 2 hard drives. This is in case one would fail, I'll always have another copy. So my pictures folder looks like this.

I have one main folder which I call D40 (everything shot on my D40)
Inside of that folder I have folders called 2008 and 2009...
Inside of those folders I have folders like "2009-01-04" all of the pictures I shot on that date go in this folder.

This might not be the best method but it's one that I understand and feels logical and secure to me. You can do it any way you like but I'd recommend having a backup just in case.

Another thing you could do if you run low on hard drive space is burn to DVDs. They will last for a hundred years (longer than DVD drives will be around). It's much harder to lose this kind of backup because its a "physical" copy of your photos. As long as nothing happens to the disks you're ok. If this didn't answer your question feel free to clarify it and I'll answer back.

Oh, and P.S. Welcome to Camera Labs!

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I let Lightroom do the organization and it does it as follows:
- jpgs and NEFs are stored together in the same place
- Everything is stored in a date-oriented folder-hierarchy: yyyy\mm\dd. I.e. all images from today get stored in a folder 2009\01\20.
And if I want to mark a certain folder with a comment to immediately see what happened on that day I'll change the folder name afterwards in some thing like ...\dd_comment. This way the date-based structure of all image folders is preserved and I can immediately see at which day in a month the visit to the zoo was: 2009\01\20_zoo.
As to backing up I just have a duplicate hard-disk that I'll save to every other week. If you think that 1TB (=1000 GB) of storage space just costs you under 100€ this is really a no-brainer.
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P.S.: I've moved this to the storage and backup section, as it is not a Nikon specific thread.

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Thomas (beware: Nikon-fanboy and moderator!) My Lens Reviews, My Pictures, My Photography Blog
D800+assorted lenses

I was wondering the same question... So nobody saves their images by category? For example pictures of their children? Or night time shots, sports shots, macro shots?

I'm a mac user so i just use a program that comes on all macs called iPhoto, its a more basic version of apple aperture or adobe light room. i upload my entire card to iphoto library and it organizes photo's by events which is really quite handy. this is the reason apple computes cost so much, your not paying for the machine... your paying for the software.

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Canon 40D + 70-200mm f/2.8L IS + 50mm f/1.8
Manfrotto 055CX3 + 496RC2
www.thomaslowe.com

You can buy the software seperately, its not that expensive.

Get Adobe Lightroom 2.4 mate - get a free trial from the adobe site, give it a go see how it works for you.

Supports loads of different ways of orgonising, lets you tag, rate, and add descriptions to all your photos, sort them into virtual folders for easy access inside lightroom but still keep them stored in date order for easy archival.

Its the best app for the PC.

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