How to Organize Your Photos On Your Computer

So after you've gone through our Bridgetown Story Session photoshoot, you'll have 90 days of content to organize.

Wow! When it comes down to it... that's a lot of files to manage.

Especially if they're not named properly.

So let's start with the basics.

File Naming Convention

So the one thing that I focus on is having a strategy that allows for the file names to be sorted in such a way that makes things easy to find.

The last thing I want to do is fumble around when people need something.

I want to be Johnny on the spot with files if people are asking about them.

Here's a generic example of how I like to name our files.

BP - Personal Branding Photography - Mark - 2019.09.15

The first section is [BP]. This stands for Bridgetown Pictures.

I name things this way so that any of our client work or other business ventures don't get mixed up.

The second section is [Personal Branding Photography]. This is the keyword that we'd like to optimize for.

In layman's terms, we want the search engine to find us when people type in Personal Branding Photography.

You should do the same for your business.

The third section is [Mark]. This is the subject, place, activity or whatever the picture is.

This makes it so that the search engine sees the difference between one image and the next.

And the fourth section is [2019.09.05]. It's obviously the date, but I wrote it in this sequence so that if you have files named the same way it will sort sequentially.

File Naming for Social Media Content

When you're organizing your files, I would always keep the originals in a place where you won't accidentally corrupt the files.

Here's how I would name social media content.

[DATE] - [KEYWORD] - [TITLE/DESCRIPTION]

It would look something like this.

2019.09.16 - Personal Branding Photography - 3 Photography Tips - Image 1

The benefit of doing it this way, is so that you can simply sort the folder and find the image you're going to use for that day and upload it.

Speaking of folders....

I would recommend organizing your content by marketing channel.

So the tree would look like this...

Marketing > Social Media Marketing > Facebook > Images

And then you'd have a different folder for Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

What do you think?

Is this helpful? Let me know in the comments below!!