File Folder Structure
Lesson 8 from: Studio Photography: Shoot and Edit While TetheredDan Brouillette
File Folder Structure
Lesson 8 from: Studio Photography: Shoot and Edit While TetheredDan Brouillette
Lessons
Class Introduction
02:45 2Importance of Tethering
09:20 3Introduction to CaptureOne
28:39 4Equipment for Shoot
06:48 5Shoot & Edit While Tethered
26:41 6Shoot & Edit While Tethered With High Key
16:06 7Post-Shoot RAW Processing
08:32 8File Folder Structure
07:13Lesson Info
File Folder Structure
We've made all of our adjustments, we know exactly what we want this to look like, so what we wanna do now is figure out some of the exporting, and we'll get into that in a minute because I wanna actually show you how to import some cards as well. So before we get there, you need to know a little bit more about your file structure and how you wanna organize your computer, because I don't know about you guys but one of the things that's always tough is trying to find a photo or it shouldn't be tough but sometimes it is, is trying to find photos within your computer when a client says oh you did photos of ours in 2014, can we get some of those. So I like to keep everything very organized. This is just kind of another lesson within a lesson here. So within any folder on my computer especially on my external drives and within the archives, I like to keep them all by year first so each drive has a title. You can see this is an external drive on my desktop, 2018A; that stands for that's the ...
first drive of 2018. By the end of the year I'll probably have A through D, these are four terabyte externals, those are just what I keep to generally work from. I have backups that are both in the cloud and other external drives. I don't have some sort of complex backup system, for better or worse this has worked so far, knock on wood but you know I like to keep everything in three places. I don't keep anything on the computer except for when I'm tethering initially so, and even then a lot times I'll tether to an external drive. This computer is not new, I've had it for four years, however it runs great because I keep hardly any files within the computer. Just you know, these are some recent shoots that haven't been fully backed up or they're waiting to be processed. Other than that, everything goes to an external drive so my computer is clutter free and works really well, and then I also know where the files are within my drive. So, if we were to do sample file structure from my computer it would be something that would be the year, and then within the year is four different folders. I have my commercial clients, I have my personal work, I have education so things like I would do for CreativeLive, all the folders that go into there, and then I have just other portrait work so sometimes I have portraits for different reasons that aren't necessarily commercial. So I have those four folders and within those folders are the individual clients. So under commercial work it might be the name of the client, and then underscore they have a, all a number that matches up with their invoicing, so it always starts off as 2000, for this shoot it'll be 2018. If it were April it'll be 04, April 1st 0401, and then at the end of that is meaning it's the first shoot of that day. Most days there's only one shoot but you know, there could be 01 or 02. So I make all of my folders match the numbers that go on the invoices so that way I can keep it all straight, and if a client comes back to me later and says oh we need an image from 2014, it's you know, whatever description they give me, I can easily find that or more importantly a person working at my studio knows where to find it because that description or that date will give them an idea of the client name, the year or the date when it was taken. And then within those folders so let's say we have a folder here called CreativeLive underscore, we'll just call it June, so 06, first, and it's the first one, oh and we forgot 2018. So 2018, 060101, so that would be our first shoot on June 1st 2018. Then within that folder that's where all our Capture One folders would go. So again we just made one today for our CL Test. You can see that would be our Capture folder, that's the RAWs, our Output folder, our Selects, and then our Trash. So all the images that are taken within there are gonna be found within there. So again my Capture's the RAWs, those are all the ones we just took, Output will be the high-res JPEGs, Selects will be any ones that we've edited later, and then a lot of times I'll make an additional folder and I'll just call it Low Res, that stands for Low Res, so that's where all the Low Res files are going to go if we need'em for web galleries, or emails or things like that. It's just easier to find it, easier to explain, and if my assistant needs to go in and find a low-res file for a client, she knows exactly where to find it. So everything's pretty self-explanatory, pretty organized, and it's consistent from client to client, year to year. So with that said we'll get rid of that folder, just start a little test folder, within that we can go, and then that way when you're searching through Capture One if you're looking through the folder structure here through your library, you know where to find it. So you just go down to System Folders, we're gonna open up our Desktop, and we're gonna know that today was the CreativeLive, I didn't name it fully cause we're gonna move it later but there's our Capture folder, oh wait was it CL Test, and this is why it's important to keep it consistent. So here's our, all of our folders within the CL CreativeLive Test folder. So these are all the images. Again, if you wanna go back through, it starts by putting them alphabetical so by name sorting. If you wanna go by Rating, you can do that, now our selected images are back at the top, and you don't have go through and look at all of them again, and figure out what was what because they're starred, it's really easy to use, and it's something that as long as you keep it consistent and if you have a staff at your studio, or it's just you, as long as everybody's on the same page, it's pretty easy and you can add other things in here too like keywording and all that. I don't do that because the contents pretty similar, I'm not stock photographers, wedding photographers, people who have a lot of different images and types of images like to keyword even by client name or anything like that. I just keep all that in the actual names of the folders so I'm not big on keywording, but it is important and people do love it, and it's something you can do within the Info here too, and you can see under this Info tab, if you didn't wanna star this images you could say oh well my selects are you know, gonna be marked to blue, and you could actually sort by Color Tag. So as you look through, they're gonna sort, actually I don't think I fully tagged that - nope - but we'll go back to Rating. But you can do it by Number or by Color Tag so it doesn't really matter which way you go. It's similar to you know, whether you're using Capture One or Lightroom, you can flag'em either way. I just like to do stars because they show up directly under the image, but if you wanna tag things to it that's fine. And then again you'll see here under the Info, this is where you can start entering keywords and sorting everything, and you can even have a Keyword Library so that way you can search through, use previously used keywords, or add new ones, or sort by keywords. So again, you'll see it's blank on my computer because I don't use that feature, but I know a lot of people ask about it or like keywords when they're searching through their images. And then again all the Metadata, you can put captions in there or anything like that for photo journalism, and it's really handy to use, easy to use, and pretty, pretty navigationally friendly.
Ratings and Reviews
Anne Dougherty
Very good class, I thought. Dan is very clear about what he wants to emphasize and what he wants to tone down, in order to support the personality and interests of the subject. He is personable yet focused on topic. Just find him very watchable and a great teacher.
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