How do you organize your food photos?

mjd

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I've noticed that some members have a cache of various food photos at their fingertips.

Currently, I've been saving all my food photos in one folder but have no subfolders. That is going to be a monster at some point.

What method do you use to organize your photos? What are some of the best methods for categorizing so it's easy to find specific photos later?

Talk to me! ;-)
 
When I'm editing, I make sure that all of my exports are well labeled with project title and date, then within that folder I'll export my watermarked or social media marked images (in their own sub-folder). I'll also add a group of tags so that they are easily searchable. I keep everything itemized by simply the year, which is pretty easy as Lightroom automatically curates those.

All of the media goes onto an external 3T drive as to not bog down my machine. I am thinking of including a cloud based storage solution as well, as all things can fail and I prefer to have 2 back-ups.
 
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I still send photos in HD (no shrinkage) to the laptop by email from my phone (I hate Bluetooth and all the USB fuss). Our younger kid - a nature enthusiast - has bogarted the only decent automatic RAW-pic camera of our household and I don't know how to utilize my hubby's SLR camera with standalone lenses. After edits I arrange some of my favorite pics to an external hard drive in date/initial or number-named subfolders (the instructor at our digital photography class recommended just plain 0001-type naming for food pics with a headword/search word like chicken_0017 or baked_0024; dates are automatic anyway) though I seldom go back to old photos. I delete most of the recipe pics as there would be a zillion by now. Sometimes I use cloud storage but there have been some issues regarding account obsolescence or sudden abolition on certain platforms.
 
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I still send photos in HD (no shrinkage) to the laptop by email from my phone

I find it much easier to use a USB stick. All you need is a little connector to plug it into your phone charging port. A USB stick will hold literally hundreds of HD photos. Then copy onto your laptop via USB port. That way I have automatic backup of the photos on the USB stick.

The connector costs peanuts: Genuine Samsung Galaxy S5 S6 S6 Edge S7 S7 Edge Micro USB OTG to USB 2.0 Connector Adapter
I currently use a 64GB USB stick (also cost very little).
 
I find it much easier to use a USB stick. All you need is a little connector to plug it into your phone charging port. A USB stick will hold literally hundreds of HD photos. Then copy onto your laptop via USB port. That way I have automatic backup of the photos on the USB stick.

The connector costs peanuts: Genuine Samsung Galaxy S5 S6 S6 Edge S7 S7 Edge Micro USB OTG to USB 2.0 Connector Adapter
I currently use a 64GB USB stick (also cost very little).
I have bad experience of a bunch of photos getting corrupted by a faulty memory stick. USB/memory sticks also deteriorate over time (in several years) and don't take dozens of re-savings/-downloads. That's why I prefer external hard drives and cloud storages for storing. My phone can be connected directly to the laptop (for importing photos) but I'm lazy: doing that requires difficult tasks :roflmao: of a) setting Bluetooth on or b) taking one other USB connection off as all of the USB ports are currently taken by other gadgets.
 
I have bad experience of a bunch of photos getting corrupted by a faulty memory stick. USB/memory sticks also deteriorate over time (in several years) and don't take dozens of re-savings/-downloads. That's why I prefer external hard drives and cloud storages for storing. My phone can be connected directly to the laptop (for importing photos) but I'm lazy: doing that requires difficult tasks :roflmao: of a) setting Bluetooth on or b) taking one other USB connection off as all of the USB ports are currently taken by other gadgets.
I use one of these to get more USB ports.

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I create a folder for each cook, with a name and month/year. For example, "FriedChick-3-21." That makes it easy to use the OSX search feature. If I do a search on "chick," I may come up with half a dozen folders, and just pick the one I want.

When I get a bunch of them, I move them to one of my many backup portable hard drives -- I like to keep about half of my 1TB built-in hard drive empty.

CD
 
Saving and storing images.....

The camera is currently fitted with a 32 Gb card which can hold a shed load of images. I capture a lot of images each time I use the camera and these are copied to the main drive on my laptop (into folders dated weekly). From there they are edited and/or selected for storage on the data drive on the laptop. Both the main drive and the data drive are backed up every Monday to external hard drives.

The images on the camera card are probably cleared every few months but until that time I have 3 copies of the originals and 2 copies of the selected/edited images (plus the ones that I post on the internet).
 
I still send photos in HD (no shrinkage) to the laptop by email from my phone (I hate Bluetooth and all the USB fuss). Our younger kid - a nature enthusiast - has bogarted the only decent automatic RAW-pic camera of our household and I don't know how to utilize my hubby's SLR camera with standalone lenses. After edits I arrange some of my favorite pics to an external hard drive in date/initial or number-named subfolders (the instructor at our digital photography class recommended just plain 0001-type naming for food pics with a headword/search word like chicken_0017 or baked_0024; dates are automatic anyway) though I seldom go back to old photos. I delete most of the recipe pics as there would be a zillion by now. Sometimes I use cloud storage but there have been some issues regarding account obsolescence or sudden abolition on certain platforms.

Most of my portable backup hard drives are FireWire, but they are hard to find, now. My RAW files are 50-60 MB each. USB is too slow when I'm backing up my car photos, where I may be moving 500 or more RAW files at a time.

CD
 
Saving and storing images.....

The camera is currently fitted with a 32 Gb card which can hold a shed load of images. I capture a lot of images each time I use the camera and these are copied to the main drive on my laptop (into folders dated weekly). From there they are edited and/or selected for storage on the data drive on the laptop. Both the main drive and the data drive are backed up every Monday to external hard drives.

The images on the camera card are probably cleared every few months but until that time I have 3 copies of the originals and 2 copies of the selected/edited images (plus the ones that I post on the internet).

On a related note, my camera has two card slots. I have mine set up to save duplicate RAW files on both cards. When I shoot cars for customers, and have to travel, I leave one card in the camera, and put one in my wallet. If the plane crashes and I get out alive, I have my customers files to FedEx from the hospital. :laugh:

CD
 
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