In this series of posts, I’m going to explore some popular photo organization strategies. We’ve all struggled with digital photo organization. The problem isn’t the photos themselves, but the tools available for organizing them.

In this part, we’ll consider Folders.

Folders

Folders are a well-accepted organization tool. Like file names, they seem to be a good tool or organization of photos. Where file names are like labels for each individual photo, folders can be thought of as boxes for grouping together related photos. They also support information hierarchy through nesting of folders.

To illustrate the strength of hierarchy, consider the following situation, which shows a picture of my cat, Man:

This is where folders are really strong. The nested folders can be very useful for quickly finding pictures of a pet-who is a cat-whose name is Man. If I were looking for this picture of Man, it would be intuitive to riffle through my folders until I got to the “Man” one. Once there, the thumbnail view of the folder contents would allow me to quickly find the specific photo.

Unfortunately, however, most of photos are not really like this first example. Many more of my photos have much more “complex” content. For example:

Now you can see the question you have to answer - should you:

• Put the photo in the ‘Steve’ folder
• Put the photo in the ‘Man’ folder
• Put the photo in yet another ‘SteveAndMan’ folder
• Place copies of the file in each of the above folders

You can make arguments for any of these choices because the information in the photo overlaps many categories. But folders require you to either:

• Choose a single folder, and potentially “throw away” information
• Choose many folders, and eat up additional disk space

In the end, neither is a good choice. Worst still, like we saw with file names, all of this is left for you to do manually.

Conclusion

Because they use the built in file system on your computer, Folders enjoy many of the same benefits as file names. Unfortunately, they also have many of the same drawbacks.

Folders Pros:

• Personalized info
• Support hierarchy
• No additional software required
• Search using your computer’s built-in utilities
• Human readable, so it’s searchable by hand

Folders Cons:

• Totally manual process
• Requires lots of work to stay on top of your photos
• Back catalog must be organized as well
• Poor scaling/flexibility as time goes on