Some of us have multiple cameras. As you acquire more cameras, smartphones, and other photo/video generating devices, how to do keep up with managing all of the files they produce?
In my house, there are seven cameras. Here they are, sorted by the number of photos/videos taken with them:
- Canon SX230
- Nikon D80
- iPhone 4 (mine)
- iPhone 4 (my wife’s)
- Sony DSC-W570
- iPad 2
- Canon SD550
How do you create a folder structure to manage all of the files from these cameras? It’s not easy. You can have photo collisions when you try to copy files into the same folders. The structure I have used successfully for the past three years is this: subdivide by videos vs. photos, then by year, then by month. For example:
- Photos
- 2012
- 01 – January
- 02 – February
- …
- 2011
- 01 – January
- 02 – February
- …
- 2012
- Videos
- 2012
- 01 – January
- 02 – February
- …
- 2012
Which works pretty well, especially for finding photos based on when you took them. But it isn’t bulletproof, because a) it is pretty time consuming (and therefore error prone) to manually put things into this structure by hand, and b) it doesn’t rule out the aforementioned nasty photo collisions.
Which is, of course, why we built the Silent Sifter – to allow you to use this structure, and get all of the benefits of it’s organization, while not spending all of the time and energy it takes to keep it updated.