SnowMoon, LLC

Slow Down - Hitting an elk will ruin both his day and yours

That’s my guess at how many photos I’ll take in 2009 – actually it’ll probably be closer to 21,000.   And, it’s time to slow down because – no, I didn’t hit an elk with my car (but that IS my favorite road sign – graphically clear) – but my ‘working’ external drive died.   We’ve tried reviving it and occasionally get it to take  breath or two, but not long enough to retrieve the files there.  I’m now slowed to a crawl as I start just with my 2009 images.

I’m not terribly upset, but annoyed more than anything.  I regularly  backed up all the basic raw files.  But I lost the organization.  I have around 100,000 images to manage and I had gone through – deleted ones that aren’t worthy of the space, or that I have enough multiples on.  Save the best, and ditch the rest.  I had them half organized in Lightroom, many keyworded.   But now – I have a clean slate.  And this is ok.  I can work at a consistent process and get them done.  I’ll share what all I do to stay on top of this monstrosity of a collection.

If I can do this twice – you can get your photos together as well.  Join me, won’t you?  I know it’s the holidays, but with Lightroom (I’m putting LightRoom 3 Beta through it’s paces with this), it’s something you can set to work on while doing something else.

STEP ONE – Get the photos all in one spot. Start with 2009.  Get them together.  One month at a time.

I have them sorted by date.  One file for each day I download from my camera, each of those under a monthly photo, and all the monthly files under a yearly one.  Sorting by date is the only way it works for me – I use keywording to sort by event or subject.  But just for now, get your photos together.  For scans, I have those in a separate folder, loosely organized by decade.

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