Folders | Staying Organized | Photographer Akron Ohio

Last week I talked about my folder system in my email account so I’m able to stay organized with bridal communication. This week, I want to dive in a little deeper with how I keep sessions and weddings organized. If you thought I was out of control with my email folders, wait until you see the crazy awesome out of control with my folders for sessions! It’s alright to laugh at me, because I laugh too!

Staying Organized with Folders on Your Hard Drive

effective ways to organize folders, photographer akron ohio, small business advice

Here’s a look at my portable external hard drive – LaCie. I have four MAIN folders – a folder for photos, titled “1 LJ Photos”, a folder for the business side of things – Business Side, a folder for personal photos, and then a folder that actually needs transferred to my desktop external hard drive – SD Card.

I’m sure you know what goes into my folder “1 LJ Photos”, if you don’t i’ll show you in a second. My Business side is where all my marketing materials, education, Rising Tide Society, blog photos, projects, and MANY other pieces are organized. That’s another folder for another time!

Let’s take a look at how I organize my main folder for all the photos that I take.

effective ways to organize folders, photographer akron ohio, small business advice

Again – undiagnosed OCD coming out, but my folders are numbered by importance. This allows me to easily find the folder that i’m looking for when searching for a photo. It works for me. That doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.

effective ways to organize folders, photographer akron ohio, small business advice

You can see that before you can get into actual weddings, I have them separated by years. I still have some of my favorites on the hard drive (just jpegs) because I never know what I may need to use for marketing purposes and it’s easier to keep the best of the best from each year on the portable hard drive then not having them there.

Once you’re into a year folder (this is 2016), I have folders for each wedding organized by DATE! So just like email folders, my wedding folder is organized the same way. It helps me stay ORGANIZED! (Nothing a common theme yet?)

effective ways to organize folders, photographer akron ohio, small business advice

Inside of each weddings folder looks something like this. A Bride’s wedding day is broken up into their own folder. This allows for easy upload to PASS, and then allows a Bride to easily look through her photos. 90% of all LJ Brides get about 1,000 photos for their wedding day. I can only imagine how daunting the task would be to have to search through every single photo just to find a photo of her and her grandparents, or her and her college roommate that was taken at the reception. This makes the life of my brides EASY! You would be surprised how many photographer make it HARDER for couples to look through their wedding photos!

So that’s the look into my folder system for my portable external hard drive. Next week we’re going to dive a little deeper into how I go about organizing the folders for each wedding for easy upload to PASS! If you’re looking for a time saving system, you won’t want to miss that post!