hi all, kat asked me about my naming system and i responded to her saying it might not blow ya away, its simple, easy and works for me.

i started to do screen captures but after i was like 8 screen captures into it, i was like, its way easier than this!!  so here goes...

i have drives that are mirrored for back up and the name of the drive is the date of the first job shot... so the drive i am working on is called 2008-04-27.  i never fill the drive up all the way but always leave about 20 gigs on it for working room if and when i need to dig back into that drive...or i make room on it by deleting non-selects or dead projects.

so on 2008-04-27, i have folders based on what i am shooting: commercial, personal, stock, private-commisions.  in each folder are folders of the shoots, the name is the date and a title of the shoot.  for example:  2007-06-14-nineplus-summer-catalog.  You can see the sample screen capture, on the left you can see the folder names, in a folder called random stock on my production computer:


then once all the files are downloaded in their folder, i rename them the date and a 4 digit number, for example: 20080804_0020.jpg.   I always sort the date by year, month, day.  I dont think i have ever shot more than 9999 images on one assignment, or at least in one day.


after every file has been named, i do my selects for the client or for stock with 1 star and my favs/portfolio or other with 2 stars.  once i am done with the selects and edits, i then toss some general meta data on the files.  i have many templates saved for meta data but for the most part i w ill only use my one called "basic" which is contact info.


then copy it over to the backup drive, i can then format the used cards and i am good to go.  I will output the images to jpgs and run my action to a low res file on the selects if it was for a client or to a stock agency.

the only tricky part is when i need to look up a shoot from a few years ago, i need to remember what category the shoot falls, stock, commercial assignment, personal.

i also do like to add additional searching content in the meta data and if i feel like i need to start using a cataloging software like iview, i can drop all the raw files into an iview catalog and have it generate over night.  i just don't really need to look up files based on keyword in the studio.

hope this as helpful, but i told you, pretty simple!