Product photography - where's that darn photo, part III.V

This is an unplanned topic, but I realized it's an important one. Can I do 3.5 in Roman numerals? Probably not, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Those pesky Romans aren't around to complain, right?

Before editing your photos, you need to get those pictures you took off your camera. Organization is key, and I thought I'd share a couple of tips on how to keep all those pictures straight.

After working with a painful jumble of pictures with the cryptic names assigned by my camera software, I realized I had to figure out a better way to organize my images. So I have two folders on our home server where my product images live.

Public Service Announcement: Don't forget to back up the drive where all your digital photos live. You don't want to lose them. Losing product pictures of items you still have is one thing, but if you lose those wedding pictures and don't have another copy? Gone forever. Back up to DVD, another drive, or some fancy backup device/server, if you're computer-geeky.

In our especially geeky setup, we are running Windows Home Server, and store all of our pictures there. It backs itself up, and I can access my photo directory from any computer in the house. (And once we get it set up, I'll be able to access it from outside my home as well, which makes things really convenient!)

So, as I was saying, two folders. One folder is the place where I dump all the pictures that came from my camera. I delete the images from my camera when I download them to my computer so I have space on the camera's memory card. I do choose the filename by date and a prefix like 'jewelry' or 'tags' so I have a rough idea about the set, but I don't spend much time on that.

Once I've chosen my images and edited the ones I want, I save the new versions to a separate folder, with descriptive names. If I need images of my work for a brochure and obviously, when listing items, I have everything in this folder, and I can often tell by filename what they are.

For that special handful of photos that came out really fantastically, I have a separate folder called Favorites. These are the ones I use for advertising, avatars (if it's a product), and business cards. I can access these quickly. Super secret tip: I also use these as my screen saver at work. It's free advertising, right? It gets people to ask me questions after that boring meeting where we discussed nothing in particular for an hour.

Now that I have a pretty large number of product photos, I also have a separate folder called Sold where I move all of the photos of things that I have sold, that I won't (or can't) make again. This is like an archive folder - it makes the list of "current" picture files more manageable to wade through, while still keeping the old ones safe for reference. Another neat thing about keeping these is that I can really see how much my photos have improved over time.

Obviously you may have a totally different system that works for you, but I wanted to share my simple system in case it helps you manage the huge influx of digital images you collect when selling your work online. How do you keep all those photos organized?