Always Be Collecting

Categorize your work as you go.

How it started

Organization transformed my photography workflow from chaos to clarity—but it took me years to get there. When I first began shooting, I was not organized at all with my photography process, and to some extent, I am still not. I would dump my photos into a folder and just give it some random name. Finally, at some point, I would add the date and subject in the title of the folder. It generally looked like this: 4_6_25_CARNIVAL_OAKLAND

I still use this method. I could be far better at this. If anybody out there has better naming conventions, please share them with me. After that, I would export all my final edits to a tray (essentially a curated collection of final selections from your photoshoot - think of it as a digital light table where you place your best images) and put it in a folder inside the original images folder labeled "done." This worked somewhat okay as long as I was working on finding something recent. But after a while, I was searching through a million "done" folders to find an image. No bueno.

How it’s growing

Then I got a little smarter—not by much—I started exporting all my trays into "finished images" folders. From there, I started to actually categorize the finals in subjects like commercial work, celebrity portraits, street photography, etc. This made life a lot easier.

Finally, within these categorizations, I began to sub-categorize my work into particular themes that were recurring. This was the most helpful in my street photography. It gave me a chance to notice what I was noticing, and a chance to continue photographing those things or change my targets. It also gave me a chance to start putting images together in potential bodies of work to share/print or things that could be used as stock images to sell. For someone like me who is a volume shooter, this made my life a lot easier. By building collections, I could move faster to share what I wanted with others, assess what I was shooting more of, and just have some damn peace of mind going through all my images.

Bringing it all together

Lastly, one of the cool helpful things is when shooting street, it's a process of discovery, and you never know how the puzzle pieces will fit together. By being more organized, you can capitalize on finding relationships with images that might be old and how they connect with something new, creating a new dialogue within your body of work.

For instance, I have a couple zines that I am working on now that have come from the reoccurrence of particular things that kept popping up in my shots. One was people with cash in their hand(s), so I decided I could put it all into something to print. Another just happened to be people wearing matching colors or complementary outfits. These connections wouldn’t have happened with my old way of chaotically shoving images into folders.

I hope me sharing some of my process along the way helps somebody out there.