Photoshop is available for both Apple and Microsoft Windows computers. In both of these operating systems, you can navigate different windows, creating folders, and using them to store files.
It is crucial to develop your own system of file storage, so that you may find your images, when you need them.
The way you organize your files is up to you. There is no law or rule. It depends on who you are, how you live, where you go, and what you are doing. In this lesson, I will show how I organize my files, to offer as a guide. My system allows me to quickly find the pictures I need.
In my life I have been blessed with the opportunity to travel, so I organize most of my photos by country (note, I also have separate folders for artwork, documents, family photos, wallpapers, etc).
If I pick any of these country folders to open, I find my photos organized by year, each being divided into three seasons. Now, I know there are 4 seasons, but winter crosses over from one year to the next, so I don't count it. I think of the year in terms of semesters: Spring, Summer, and Fall. I put a little "z" before the word Fall, so it fits chronologically. Note, in seasons where I took no photos, there is no folder.
When I open any one of these folders, I see folders for states:
When I open any of these folders, I see my photos organized by town:
At this point, I may create additional folders if necessary, by event, who I was with, or where in town. The benefit of this system is, I can use Windows to search for any one place, and get a ton of photos immediately (here I typed Cahoon, for a beach on Cape Cod):
One problem with this system is, eventually you want to put all your best photos together in a Porfolio folder, and then you have the dilemma - do you copy and paste them in separate folders, or do you move them?
If you move a photo from one folder to, say, a Portfolio folder, then you might forget when and where you took the photo. Now, computers often save this information, and you can view it by either switching the folder view to DETAILS mode, or by sliding your mouse cursor over the file and waiting. The problem with that is, the information provided can get lost or overwritten. I have found, if I copy and paste a file to a new hard drive, it records the date I pasted it, rather than the date I originally took the photo. It also depends on the file type - I find that RAW files record all the camera settings, date and time, much better than JPEGs.
Another option is to write a new name for the file, where you can include the date, location, and any other details you want to add. Of course, writing names for thousands of files is a ridiculous waste of time and energy. But it's fine for one or two special photos.
Now, if you copy and paste a photo (or any file) into a separate folder, you're letting one image take twice the space on your hard drive - not a big deal for JPEGs, but once you start shooting RAW files, it adds up quickly. As a point of reference, I usually shoot somewhere around 4000 photos a season. When I used to shoot JPEG's the folder usually went up to 5-20 gigabytes of space. Now, the same number of photos in RAW goes up to 280 Gigs. That's a lot of storage space for 4 months of work.
Obviously, when you shoot RAW, you need to be more selective of what to keep and what to delete. But, you also need to consider how many times you can paste the same file into different folders, it does get wasteful.
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