Organising files on your external hard drive. how?

[bmorrisdavies]

I just bought myself a 1TB external hard drive to store all my photos on. Would you reccomend putting ALL you decent shots on? And also, how to keep it in order? Do you just stick 'em all in hoping you will eventually find the right photo when you are looking for one?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

And please visit my flickr and my website!

[donoreo]

Organise them the same way as your internal drive, then copy those over the the external so you have a back up. One copy in either location is not really enough. The hard drive in the external is just as likely to fail as the internal one.

[matt wilson]

As above for me .I also save original raws so I can go back to them.

Another option I use is the windows live gallery free storeage for favourite shot's and remote in case of hard disk failure .

[mudbug]

+1 for storing online. I store my best online, and back up all on external. As for organizing, depends on how many you have. For example, open my bird file and you will see a list of files with a bird name on each. Open one of the bird files and you will see photos and more files. The next files are labeled flight and possibly bath, depending on the bird photos I have. All my files have sub-catagories, a lot, to help find photos quicker. As for vacations and such, they go in the vacation file. I will take photos from those such as sunsets, that I want to use, and copy into that sub-catagory. The more you can seperate your photos the better. The other day, a friend saw one of my photos of a black bellied duck bathing that he wanted me to print. It took all of 5 sec to find the photo. When you first organize it takes awhile to get all your photos set, but after that it is quick and easy. Good luck.