Organizing Pictures

[SimTrains]

After a few years of taking pictures trackside now I'm starting to develop a problem. I have a 100gb backup drive which all my pictures go to, each month I create a new folder which all the pictures from that month go to. All the pictures taken in September of 09 go to the Septerber 2009 folder and so on and so forth. The problem I am having now is with the passage of time it is becoming more difficult to pinpoint and find exact pictures that I am looking for, without browsing every folder til I find the one I'm looking for. I'm wondering, how does everyone else categorize and store there pictures? I'm interested to hear what other people do.

[EMTRailfan]

I too organize by year. Then in each year, I organize by RR, then by chase/event and date. Something like this:
2009/CSXT/Erie_14Oct2009/...
I usually don't rename the specfic photo names unless I edit them for some reason, but then they go in another folder. Above is just for my unedited originals.

[railohio]

In boxes from Logan organized by railroad and then by division/subdivision if applicable. Shortlines are filed together in boxes alphabetically. I keep purchased photos grouped by photographer if a collection (mostly) fills its own box, otherwise they're filed in a miscellaneous "Purchased" box.

[dj_paige]

Numerous pieces of software let you "tag" your photos with whatever information you want.

A photo could have "CSX" "Water Level Route" "SD70M" "Utica, NY" "Stack Train".

Later, you can search by any tag, such as: find all my "SD70M" photos; or combinations of tags, such as find all my "SD70M" and "Union Pacific" photos. Using tags to find photos is a much more natural way to do this than finding by dates, because most people remember the photo contents and not the date. It is also a much more powerful and flexible way to organize, as folders and filenames do not provide this capability.

Picasa (free) is one such piece of software. Photoshop Elements and Lightroom are commercial pieces of software that have these capabilities. (Photoshop Elements and Lightroom both offer 30day free trials yo u can download). At least one railroad blogger seems very satisfied having his railroad photos organized inside of Lightroom (scroll down to the paragraph labelled "The Reward" as much of the article doesn't apply unless you are converting from Photoshop Elements to Lightroom). I too am very satisfied with my railroad (and other) photos in Lightroom. I'm sure there are other software that have tagging capability as well.

[TREnecNYP]

iPhoto.

- A