My Digital Photo Organization: Principle 4 – Create Your Structure

Intro: This post is #4 is a series I am doing on my digital photo/file organization. In previous posts, I covered how I gather my photos into one place, how I name my files, and I described my backup plan. Here, I will discuss the structure I have set up for my files.

There are many ways to organize your file folders on your computer to hold your photos (and documents). A common method often seen in genealogy is to organize by family surnames – and even color code folders to represent different branches. A great place to review options is via Cyndi’s List. Though common, this is not a method I use – for two reasons:

• #1 – surname organization approaches present challenges as people can belong to more than one surname or surname group (e.g., a woman getting married and changing her surname). I do not want to deal with trying to figure out where to “place” a document based on the surname or dealing with possible duplicates generated by placing the same file in more than one place.
• #2 – my genealogy software is built precisely for the purpose of organizing individuals and their associated documents; no need for me to replicate that with a folder structure on my computer

Instead, my organizational focus is to ensure my photos/files are organized by category/format. I do not organize them in folder structures mirroring surnames. This structure is ideal for the way my mind works and is aligned with my many years of professional experience in library and information sciences and this is where I draw my inspiration. If you look at the structure of many archives, for example, you are likely to see materials organized by category/format. For example, the Tennessee State Library & Archives is a place I research in often and one helpful way to navigate their collections is to understand the format of the material you are looking for? Are you looking for a vital record? a newspaper clipping? a court record? Knowing this is one entryway into their vast resources.

I consider my photos & genealogy files analogous to my personal archive, so I established a folder structure that reflects categories & format types. Within each format type, I have 3 possible sub-divisions – materials related to my family, materials related to my husband’s family, and materials related to the family union we created upon our marriage (us and our 5 kids).  The primary exception to this is my “Documents” folder as that has multiple divisions for materials like certificates, obituaries, school records, military records, and more.

With my simple structure in place, I then leverage the incredible power of metadata to label and organize all of my photos & files. The metadata allows me to easily search across my ENTIRE archive for whatever I need.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series for an overview of the power metadata can offer and how I use it for my organization.