Most of my work is wedding photography but I also do some commissioned commercial work and family portraits. I, therefore, have the following parent folders:

Commercial
Portraits
Weddings

I then think about my work in terms of the year. Although I’m not brilliant at remembering exact dates, I can recall the year that I shot a wedding, so I expand my hierarchy as follows:

Commercial
2009
2010
Portraits
2009
2010
Weddings
2009
2010

Next, I create a folder for each client in the appropriate year. For example, the wedding of Sarah and Scott, photographed in 2010, would be positioned as follows:

Commercial
2009
2010
Portraits
2009
2010
Weddings
2009
2010
Sarah & Scott

• Template client folders

Now you have a logical place on your disk to store the images, wouldn’t it be handy if every client had the same sub-folder structure? You could then easily find the original files, exported JPGs, client files and orders.

Instead of manually creating a series of sub-folders for each new job I store a blank folder structure on my hard disk, which I can then copy and paste into each new client folder. Here’s an example of my wedding folder template:

Wedding Client
01 Original Files
02 High JPG Develops
03 Low JPG Develops
04 Blog Images
05 Facebook Images
06 Orders
07 Album Design
08 Website

This is copied for each new wedding client, resulting in the following hierarchy of folders:

• Import your images

Now you’ve spent a little time on preparation, it’s a simple process of copying your images into the correct folder and importing them into Lightroom or your application of choice.

For my client Sarah and Scott, using the example above, this would be:

Weddings/2010/Sarah & Scott/01 Original Files

Your Comments