Image organization may not get the same level of attention from photographers compared to, say, post-processing, but it sure is important – assuming you ever want to find, edit, and share your images weeks, months, and years from now, that is!
Because here’s a hard truth:
A disorganized photo collection is effectively worthless. If you can’t retrieve specific images as needed, and you can’t quickly access your best shots when a friend, a family member, or a client comes knocking, then you’re missing out on what photography is all about: preserving memories and moments to share with others.
The next truth is more pleasant:
Organizing your photos – whether you have a few hundred, a few thousand, or even a few million – doesn’t have to be difficult. With the right approach, you can spend just a few hours per month keeping your photos stored, categorized, keyworded, and backed up. In other words, you can bypass the tedium and focus on the fun stuff, while also ensuring that your images remain consistently accessible.
And in this ultimate guide to photo organization, I show you how. I offer my recommended approach to image management, including:
- My favorite storage and backup solutions
- The top photo organizers on the market
- The AI-powered software that’ll save you so much time
- My own photo-management workflow
- Much more!
So if you’re ready to finally get your image catalog organized, let’s dive right in!
Start With an Image-Storage Solution
Whether you’re a digital photographer or a film snapper, your image-organization system should always start with some form of storage – in other words, some method of keeping your photos safe that goes beyond “camera memory cards thrown in a box” or “film negatives strewn across the kitchen table.”
There are several great ways to store your photos, and my specific recommendations do depend on a variety of factors: your image medium (digital RAW files vs JPEGs vs 35mm film vs large-format negatives, etc), the size of your image catalog, the type of accessibility you require, your budget, and more.
How to Store Digital Photos
If you shoot digitally – or you shoot film but create digital scans of your work – here are the storage solutions that I generally recommend:
Cloud storage. This is a type of storage in which you upload your image files to a third-party server for a fee. Cloud-based approaches come with a couple of major benefits. First, you can access your images from anywhere, provided you have an internet connection, which is ideal for regular travelers and folks who like to edit images on the go. Second, you can (generally) expect your files to remain safe from common problems affecting local-drive solutions, such as viruses, corruption, and physical damage. But cloud storage can be expensive, especially if you have a large image catalog – check out the price of Dropbox subscriptions that go past a couple of terabytes, and you’ll see what I mean! – plus you’ll need to constantly re-download images from the cloud for review and editing, which can be annoyingly slow.
External hard drives. This is the primary image-storage method that I use. I think it combines a level of flexibility with budget-friendliness, especially if you do your image review and editing on a single computer. Basically, external-hard-drive storage involves offloading your image files onto a local drive, which you can keep connected to your computer (or carry with you while traveling, as in the case of standard USB drives). I personally maintain a bay of drives that I use both for image storage and image backup; it contains 30+ GB worth of storage and can be reconfigured and expanded as required. But when I started out, I used portable drives that I frequently connected and disconnected from my computer, which worked great until my catalog passed the 4 TB mark.
Network-attached storage. The biggest drawback to external hard drives is, in my opinion, the lack of accessibility. You can only retrieve files from drives that are connected to your PC, and while this is fine for photographers like me (who generally stick to a single computer when culling, organizing, and editing), it’s not ideal for folks who work on multiple devices. That’s where network-attached storage (or NAS) comes in; it offers all the same benefits of external hard drives, but you can retrieve your files from any authorized device that’s connected (physically or wirelessly) to your NAS drives. Of course, network-attached storage isn’t cheap, but for the serious photographer or archivist who requires location-independent access to a large catalog of image files, it’s worth the cost.
How to Store Film Photos
Storing prints, negatives, and slides is both easier and harder than storing digital files. Easier, because you don’t have to worry about the complexity of cloud-storage packages or pay for network-attached storage that costs hundreds (or thousands) of dollars; harder, because physical materials take up space, take extra energy to organize, and are harder to keep safe in the long run.
Here are a few of the best ways to store your physical images:
Photo storage boxes. Storage boxes are simple, they’re reasonably priced, and they get the job done. You can use a complex filing system or a more basic approach, but with your photos packed into storage boxes, you can be confident that they’ll be reasonably safe, well-organized, and accessible (provided that you maintain a solid image-organization workflow!). Additionally, it’s important that you purchase durable, acid-free boxes to limit damage and degradation. (You should ideally place your photo storage boxes in a cool, dry place for the same reason.)
Plastic cases. The main difference between storage boxes and plastic cases is the level of accessibility. Put your photos in a storage box, and you’ll need to rely on external labeling to know what images are contained within; put your photos in a plastic case, and you can identify your landscapes from your portraits with a glance. What’s also cool about plastic cases is that they often include little interior cases for added protection – though you can always purchase plastic interior cases to use with your photo storage boxes if needed.
Sleeves and albums. If your primary goal is to keep your images stored safely, either of the above options are great. However, if you want to ensure that your images are both safe and viewable, sleeves are a good choice. The idea here is to place your negatives, slides, or prints in high-quality plastic sleeves, then slot the sleeves into an empty album. You can flip through the album to view your materials, and you can also share your prints with friends and family.
Before I close out this section, I do want to mention:
If you’re a film photographer who only creates analog photos, I highly encourage you to work on digitizing your image catalog. Over time, negatives, slides, and prints will degrade – and unless you digitize them in some form, they’ll eventually be rendered useless. A good film scanner won’t cost an arm and a leg, and it’ll make such a difference in the long run! (And if you’d prefer to avoid investing in a scanner, you can always digitize your analog images by photographing them with a high-quality digital camera.)
Choose the Best Photo-Organization Software
Once you’ve settled upon an image-storage solution, you’ve taken the first step – but you still have a ways to go! In addition to your basic method of storage, I recommend investing in an image-management program.
These programs are all designed to help you organize and access your photos as needed, though they vary widely in their approach. Some photo organizers offer manual tools for image categorization, keywording, and search, while others lean into cutting-edge AI technology to save time and effort. Some organization software focuses purely on image management, while other software combines both management and editing features in a single package.
I’ve previously written a rundown of the best photo organizers on the market, but here are three of my favorites:
Excire Foto 2024. Yes, I’m an Excire partner, but I do in fact believe that the company’s dedicated image manager leads the pack. The program offers a slew of conventional organization tools for keywording and categorizing your files, but more importantly, it includes state-of-the-art AI features – such as prompt-search, auto-keywording, facial-recognition software, and more – to help you organize your photos and then instantly retrieve them.
Capture One Pro. For professional photographers who require a combination of photo-organization capabilities and editing tools, Capture One Pro is a great choice. After hands-on testing, I decided not to use the program myself – the price is a little too high for my liking – but I do appreciate the tethered shooting workflow and session-based organization options, which is ideal for pros that work with portrait or commercial clients. The core image-management features are good, too, and the editing tools are outstanding, even if the sheer number of options can be overwhelming at first glance.
Adobe Lightroom Classic. I started using Lightroom Classic way back in 2010 or so, when it was still called Lightroom 3. I loved it then, and I love it now, though I do wish the image-organization portion of the program (i.e., the Lightroom Library module) were both faster and more streamlined. Adobe has added some eye-catching AI technology to the program’s editing module, but the image-organization features are almost entirely manual (just as they were nearly 15 years ago, when I downloaded Lightroom for the first time). One bonus, however, is the robust collection of Lightroom plugins, which let you enhance the software’s core features with additional editing capabilities. And Excire even offers a powerful image-organization plugin for Lightroom users, called Excire Search 2024; it takes all the futuristic AI tools contained in Excire Foto 2024 and brings them right into the Lightroom interface!
Develop an Image-Organization Workflow (With Help From AI)
So you have your image-storage solution, and you have your image organizer. Now it’s time to talk about an image-organization workflow – in other words, a consistent approach you can use to keep your photos categorized and accessible within your photo-organization software.
There are a few ways you can manage this, but here’s the workflow that I’ve used for years:
Step 1: Upload the Images
First, I make sure that all of my images are included in my photo organizer’s database. When I’m using Excire Foto 2024, this involves pointing the software to my connected external hard drives; when I’m using Adobe Lightroom Classic, this involves importing the files directly. (No matter your program, the approach will be fairly similar.)
Step 2: Sort Your Files into Folders, Albums, or Collections
Next, I separate my files into collections (which are basically just virtual folders). I like to group by genre first, and then date – so that all my street photos taken during my spring trip to New York City are located in my “Street” collection, with a single sub-collection dedicated to each day. You may prefer to group your photos differently, and I encourage you to adjust as needed!
Step 3: Apply Keywords (If Needed)
Now I want to emphasize the importance of keywording your images. Keywords make it easy to retrieve your files months or years later, when you no longer remember where a specific shot is located but you know it’s somewhere in your catalog.
One option here is to manually apply descriptive keywords to your images, as I discuss in my photo keywording article. But this takes a huge chunk of time, and I find it exceedingly boring, so I prefer to rely on auto-tagging, where the program does the keywording for me. There are a handful of image organizers that use AI-powered auto-keywording, but so far, the only one that has given me excellent results is Excire (both the Lightroom plugin and the standalone Foto 2024 version, which actually use the same underlying technology.)
For more details on how you can use AI to handle all your keywording needs, see my article on image tagging! I cover the process in detail, using Excire Foto 2024 as my model, and I talk about how you can combine auto-keywording and manual keywording for an even more effective approach.
One other point that I’d like to make here:
If you want to ensure that your photos can be rapidly retrieved at a later date, image keywording is a necessary evil – with a couple of key exceptions.
You see, Excire Foto 2024 (and Excire Search 2024) includes a new prompt-search feature, which lets you simply type in a description of an image in your catalog and then immediately view the corresponding file. This requires zero effort on your part, yet in my experience, it’s even more effective than Excire’s keyword-search tool.
While keywording (or auto-keywording) can still be important for image categorization – some photographers like to apply very specific keywords, such as locations or names of people, for instance – I’ve actually found myself eschewing keyword-search entirely and just relying on prompt-search to find my photos. It really is that good.
I don’t do a whole lot of portraiture, but if I did, instead of relying on name-based keywords, I would probably rely on facial-recognition software. There are a number of image-organization programs that include facial-recognition tech, including Lightroom Classic, but Excire’s technology is by far the best I’ve tried in that arena.
Step 4: Rate and Cull Your Files
At this point, your photos should be organized into the relevant folders and will be easy to retrieve as required (thanks to keywording, prompt search, or some other form of AI-powered technology).
If your only goal is to organize your photos for later retrieval, you don’t need to go any further; your image-organization workflow can stop right here.
However, if you want to edit your files, you want to share your images with the world, you want to cull your images for personal reasons, or you simply wish to save storage space, I recommend incorporating a final step into your organization workflow: image review.
The aim here is to separate your files based on their photographic potential. For instance, which images should you spend time editing? Which files should you share on social media? Which photos should you send to clients? Which images should you print? Which photos should you delete? All of these questions cannot be answered without a culling process, and if efficiency is important to you, it’s important to make this process both streamlined and consistent.
As with the other image-management recommendations I’ve included in this article, I cannot offer one universally agreed-upon best culling workflow. But I can share the workflow – which I first learned from Scott Kelby – that works for me as well as many other photographers, with the caveat that you should absolutely modify it to fit your own needs!
Here’s what I like to do:
First, I pull up the collection of images from my recent photoshoot. I take a quick look at every shot, adding Pick flags to all the images that have any sort of potential and adding Reject flags to the images that are obviously bad (due to misfocusing, camera shake, and so on).
Next, I’ll filter the collection so I can only see the flagged images, and I’ll go through the set once more. This time, however, I’ll look more carefully, and I’ll give each image a star rating. Both Excire and Lightroom let you apply 0-5 stars, and I like to save time by pressing the numbers on my keyboard.
Finally, I’ll sort the collection by the number of stars. I may not do anything with the files right then, but images with four or five stars are slated for editing, with the goal of eventually sharing on social media or to my online portfolio. Images with three stars and below generally go unedited, though I’ll go through them every now and again to see if any are interesting.
(Some photographers like to delete photos with Reject flags, or even photos below three stars, but I just can’t bring myself to take that approach. Even my worst photos can have instructional value way down the line, plus my tastes change; if I had deleted all my two-star photos from 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have access to some images that, years later, I really like!)
I personally enjoy the culling process, and I learn a lot from reviewing my photos, so I generally do it manually. But if you shoot a lot of photos and have limited time or you find culling tedious, there are tools out there to help you speed the process along. Excire’s new X-tetics AI feature, for instance, analyzes your files and applies an aesthetics score to each image, which you can then use to sort your shots. Of course, the effectiveness of such a tool depends on your personal tastes, but I will mention that Excire’s X-tetics AI model has been used to judge several international photography competitions!
Don’t Forget About File Backup!
Images are fragile. And while today’s digital files may not be as prone to damage as, say, a stack of glass negatives from the 1860s, it’s disturbingly easy to lose a photo – or your entire catalog – to theft, accidents, bad weather, viruses, hard-drive failure, and more.
That’s why I obsessively back up my photos, and it’s why you should back up your photos, too.
Now, I’ve written an in-depth guide to image backup solutions, and I don’t want to rehash it all here. But I want to explain the 3-2-1 method of image backup, which I encourage you to use.
The 3-2-1 method is simple. It states that you should have, at all times, three copies of your photos, using at least two different types of storage media, and with at least one copy stored off-site.
You can follow the 3-2-1 method in a variety of different ways, but a common approach is to have one set of photos on your main hard drive, a second copy of photos on another local drive (such as an internal HDD or SSD, an external USB drive, or a network-attached storage drive), and a third copy of photos saved to the cloud.
If your catalog is relatively small, you could use a portable USB drive for your first backup, then create a second backup using a cloud-storage service such as Dropbox or Google Drive. And if you have a larger catalog, you might create your main backup using internal hard drives or NAS devices in a RAID configuration, then use a backup-focused cloud-storage service like Backblaze to create your off-site copy. (In my guide to the leading Google Photos alternatives, I discuss a few of my favorite cloud-storage solutions.)
Keep Your Photos Organized, Accessible, and Safe!
Image organization might not be as thrilling as actually taking photos. But if you want to keep your files accessible, it must become a part of your workflow.
Fortunately, image management doesn’t have to be complicated – and once you have the main structures in place (your storage system, your photo organizer, and your backup solution), you’ll be able to concentrate on the less technical elements: actually categorizing and culling your images.
Of course, even categorization and culling can be tedious. However, thanks to the integration of AI-powered tools – such as auto-keywording, intelligent aesthetic ratings, prompt search, and facial-recognition search – it’s now possible to streamline your photo-organization workflow even further.
That way, you can spend less time organizing your photos, and more time taking, appreciating, and sharing them!
