This part is not glamorous or exciting but it is a necessary piece of the photo editing puzzle. Being able to quickly find your images and know where they all will give you not only peace of mind, but lets you work more efficiently.

Don’t waste your time finding lost images, or slogging through duplicates, or worrying about overwriting files or accidentally deleting them. Instead think it through before you even start, before you get into trouble or create a big mess.

Then spend more time shooting and actually working on your images instead of stressing out looking for any missing files.

How you do this will be an individual choice for you. Some people like to sort images by date and have folders for each year, month and day. I use categories because I personally can’t remember when I shot what so dates become a nightmare for me later looking for images.

My setup has one main parent folder one called Photos, then I use subfolders for different categories that make sense to me. Inside those are further subfolders within those categories that relate to each individual shoot.