Go Lightroom

Jamie Thingelstad wrote a useful article about directory structure for digital photos.

This structure has three main features: consistency, uniqueness, and backup management.

1. Consistency is important. You want to make sure that regardless of camera, subject or any other variable there is a consistent way to find a photo.
2. Uniqueness of photo name is important. Even though the directory structure would allow for multiple files with the same name, you should guarantee that every file is unique and “fully qualified” for each individual photo.
3. Backup management is handled most simply through your file structure. I don’t like to rely on fancy backup programs to know what has been backed up or not, I like to be able to achieve this through chronology.

This looks to be solid, but I personally prefer to have 3 trees of directories with similar trees and independent backups for each:

1. First tree for Shoots – here I store everything I shoot in RAW format.
2. Second tree for Processing – there are shoots that were considered to be good for Photoshop processing.
3. And third is Print. Here I put all final versions of photographs for printing.

Inside these trees I have very similar structure like Jamie has.