Organizing your Photos and Videos [Mac OS X]

Here's the thing, as much as I love my Macs, and trust me, I do love my Macs, I hate iPhoto. Don't get me wrong, it's a good program. But it is geared too much towards people that have no idea what they are doing.

Having a tidy folder structure in my operating system is very important, and with iPhoto that is just simply not easy to do.

So I am going to explain how, after many years of trial and error, I have come up with a great solution for organizing, managing and uploading my photos and videos.

Setup

I have a folder in my computer that I simply call "Photos". Inside that folder is where I save all the event folders which contain all my photos and videos from various events. It doesn't matter where you place your "Photos" folder, as long as it is somewhere that makes sense to you. I have mine directly under my user folder.

Here's an idea of what my "Photos" folder looks like:

After years of working on organizing and re-organizing my photos in order to make them work perfectly, I realized that the best way to do it is to have single folder structure, and never have folders inside of folders.

For example, let's take an event that happens every year, like Christmas. Instead of having something like this (as so many people do):

I have found it works much better to do this:

In other words, do not create folders inside of folders. You should have one main folder (Photos) and then inside that folder you place all your individual event folders. But no nested folders. I hope this make sense.

Also, naming is important. Come up with a naming convention that you will like and that you will find easy to use and remember. As you can see above, I simply name my events with the event name and the date or year.

In this next post I will explain how to correctly and easily download your photos and videos from your cameras and save them on your newly set up folder structure.