It's a mess!

[Guest]

After about four years of serious photography, and being unable to concrete a proper workflow, my hard drive is an absolute mess!   There are photos all over the place in folders I haven't seen for ages or can't remember where they are, and there photos I can't find any more it's doing my head in. 

Id love to enter photography competitions but I can't find the photos I want to enter, let alone process them.  Help!  Should I outsource the organisation? Or Is it better to buy two new hard drives erase everything off my Mac desktop and start again?

It is almost too much for me to try to sort out. I'm beside myself. 

[Brian]

I'd buy either one big EHD or two EHD and split them into categories. If you shoot professionally, have a main folder called "Personal" and one called "Client." From there create folders with the year and then project names OR project names / type of photography and then by year and then by month. You could also have a contest folder, it's really up to you.

Instead of sending your whole Mac out to get organized, how about purchasing a program called Photo Mechanic. It's an awesome program that allows you to quickly cull and view images, much faster than trying to use the Mac Finder. The program allows you to set ratings/color codes to the files that you like, then you can tell the program to hide all the non-color-coded images and then you can move those images from one folder to another within Photo Mechanic. It's pretty powerful. Nikon has a free version, if you shoot Nikon, called ViewNX. Nikon's software is buggy and has its quirks, but it's free. Honestly, I'm going to get Photo Mechanic myself in the near future.

Here is someone demonstrating on how they use Photo Mechanic:

 

[Brian]

Before buying anything, write down a directory / organizational tree on a piece of paper. Think things through and  make some sort of flowchart. Throwing money at this problem isn't going to solve much; believe me, I'm very good at spending people's money.

Start with one folder, just one folder...don't get overwhelmed with all the folders, and copy images from your main hard drive to a EHD. Then when you are sure the images are intact, delete them from the main / internal HD. I've learned the hard way that it's not good practice to cut/move files, always copy, then verify, then delete. If something goes wrong during the data transfer when you "Cut & Paste," your file might go "Poof" and it's lost forever. I've personally experienced this and it wasn't fun telling my customer that his un-replaceable file was gone. (His files were corrupted and nobody knew it.) Anyway, I'm digressing...

There is no easy way to do this, you are going to have to CULL-CULL-CULL. Nobody can do it for you, unless they have been working as your assistant for years and know what you are after. Be ruthless. You do not need 75 photos of your lunch taken at a restaurant from 4 years ago. Use the rating system within Photo Mechanic. Anything 4 or 5 starts, keep. 3 stars is a maybe. 2 or less...delete them. Take things in small chunks, one folder at a time. Breathe.

This is a lot like cleaning out an old garage or attic filled with JUNK.

How to install Photo Mechanic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ycvx3D8M21w

[Brian]

I'm sure you are also going to ask what Hard Drives I recommend. I like G-Drives myself. This WD HD unit also caught my eye. I would set it up in a RAID 1 Configuration (HD Mirroring) and that will give you 6TB storage space. The 12TB rating is for a RAID 0 setup, and RAID 0 is NOT MEANT for long-term backup storage.