We've all been there. In the middle of a conversation your friend pulls out a phone and starts scrolling through hundreds of images trying to find the one that illuminates your chat. Minutes pass. You wish your friend would give up. Your friend is determined to find the picture, scrolling increasingly frantically while muttering about needing to organise everything some time.
Life was simpler in the days of film. You shot a roll of film and took it to your nearest Boots for development. You got your negatives and prints back neatly packed in an envelope with the date noted. You organised them in albums, or maybe a shoebox. Either way you could find your pictures.
Things are different now. We take photographs at a rate and in a volume the film generation could not imagine. Critically, those photographs don't exist as material objects to be managed and sorted. Instead, they exist digitally in storage devices - whether that be phones, cameras, local or cloud drives - 'organised' primarily by file name as determined by the conventions of the makers of imaging devices.
With so many images and no material objects - negatives and prints - to facilitate organisation it becomes more and more important to ensure that digital files are arranged in a way that allows you to find what you're looking for when you need it. This is what is known as Digital Asset Management (DAM), as in, Where are my DAM(N) pictures?
You could try to do this through your file management program on your laptop, but your options for organising and, more importantly, finding your pictures are quite limited. Instead, it is better to use dedicated DAM software for photographers. This can be a standalone app, but more likely it will be a organiser tool built into a more comprehensive photo management and processing package like Lightroom. Whatever package you use the most important elements of photo management are names, tags, and discipline.
You need to work out a scheme for naming folders and files. There are no rules here. You should use whatever makes sense for you, but you should aim to get it right from the start. Coming up with a naming scheme, applying it to thousands of images and then deciding you want to change your scheme is a recipe for frustration and countless hours wasted in front of a monitor when you could be doing something better. Think strategically. Just because a naming scheme makes sense right now it doesn't mean it will make sense twenty or thirty thousand photos down the line. Taking time to get it right from the start may save you an awful lot of time later on.
Many popular naming schemes are based on the date photographs were taken. If all the images are of a specific place or a specific occasion this could also be included. Since I'm a serial expat and travel a lot my scheme is: [Country] [Year] [yyyy-mm-dd]. So, for example, my most recent folder is China/ 2024 / 2024-03-15. Some people also rename each image file, but I leave them in their standard out of camera format.
Once you have organised your files in named folders you need to organise them further with tags / labels / keywords. Again, the choice of which keywords to use, how many to use, and how specific you want your keywording to be is up to you. While the ability to search by multiple keywords is the norm I think it is still valuable to be consistent when using keywords. If you use the keyword 'car' for some images and the keyword 'automobile' for others you will only make difficulties for yourself. Either use one or the other, or use both for every appropriate image. Make sure when entering keywords you are spelling them correctly, particularly if you are using place names, or words in a different language from your own.
Many photo management tools also allow you to mark individual files with a star rating system and with colour codes and then search or filter on these. You can also search or filter via the EXIF data contained in your image files, data that you don't have to enter yourself since it's already generated by your camera. You can then create searches based on any of these markers, or any number of them in combination. In Lightroom these techniques can be used to create temporary or permanent Collections. These are groups of images drawn from across your entire photo catalogue based on your search criteria.
Finally, you need discipline. Organising and tagging files can be tedious work, easy to put off for another time. However, developing the discipline to organise and tag as soon as possible after taking photos will save you time in the long run. Leave your unorganised photos to build up for too long and you may end up feeling overwhelmed by the challenge, or you may start but never catch up. Or you may have forgotten information about particular images that will make it difficult to accurately or adequately tag your images.
Make photo management an integral part of your photographic practice and you will be able to find the image you are looking for when you want it. Apart from saving yourself and your friend time as you try to find just the right image, you will also be able to revisit - and enjoy - pictures that might otherwise have remained unseen and forgotten.
Good reminder! Discipline is key in organizing, no matter the tools you use.
I have changed my approach in cataloging my photos over the years. And if you're using different programs it's not always possible to transfer the same method everywhere (Lightroom has a "pick" flag, Capture One doesn't). I never really bothered with tagging, it looks handy but I just never found a system that works well in terms of what tag names to use (and how detailed it needs to get).
Simply sorting the files in folders by year and within these folders based on a yymmdd-[short description] format. Backup these folder to a NAS and from there to an external HDD. (not forgetting to backup the catalog files of the photo editors as well)
In general I use a star-rating to cull photos and maybe a color-tag for some easy recognition of certain photo's. But critically, after I say "it's done" in the photo editor (LR, C1, PhotoLab whatever), I export a high-res (tiff) file and store this in a separate folder location. Then I use digiKam (https://www.digikam.org) to catalog just these files. Because in the end, every photo that leaves my computer has to come from digiKam (I use this tool as well to make low-res jpgs etc - I don't want those copies to dilute my main catalog).
For me that has worked well so far, but YMMV - there are dozens of ways how to do this. But again: discipline is key in organizing.
After getting stuck in Apple Photos system a decade ago (where I never felt confident about that the files had maintained integrity) I switched to just dumping everything in a year based folders. I do have a diary so I know more or less when things happen, but it is an interesting dilemma.