Digital Filing & Management of Photos and Documents?

[gathompson56]

I am curious as to how others are storing their digital copies of photos and documents.
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Photos
I have recently inherited 3 binders of family photos to add to my collection which I have now started scanning.

As I remove the photos form the old "magnetic photo pages" I have been writing all of the details on the back of the photos. The photos are then scanned into jpgs and stored in a temporary directory "Photo Binder A".

These photos are then imported into Lightroom where I will enter peoples names, occasion and location as keywords. I intend to change the file names to include dates such as "1960-07-08 Birthday" to allow sorting of photos by date. The final step will be to use the map function of lightroom to add GPS co-ordinates to the meta data.

Once these steps are completed I am intending to copy many of these images to Apple Photos. That makes the images very portable.

Documents
I have very nearly completed scanning old family documents. These are all assigned to directories sorted by surname and date: "Thompson, Grant. 1960-05-05. Report Card". These directories will grow as i continue internet searches for my ancestors.


The Dilemma
I have one master directory for images and one directory for documents. Multipage documents are in pdf form. Lightroom will not import pdfs. Ideally I would view all of my documents in chronological order in one application, such as Lightroom, but that will not happen unless I convert pdfs to image files.


What is your management process for your files?

Thanks, Grant

[eventide]

So I’m not entirely sure how I wound up doing things this way, but it's what works for me. I have main directories for photos and scanned family documents on an external hard drive. For whatever reason, I have decided not to save documents I download from subscription sites on Ancestry or FamilySearch here.

I am a photographer so I have many photos, not just for genealogy. The directory contains folders sorted by date and identifier. I manage them in Lightroom and use keywords/metadata so I can locate them later.

My file structure looks something like this
Photos > 2022-10-31-Hendrickson > HendricksonWilliam-01.jpg

Like you, I save my documents as images but multi-page docs are saved as PDFs. Documents are stored in another directory with my 4 grandparents' surnames.
Documents > Hendrickson > HendricksonWilliam-DeathCertificate-11071899.pdf

That said, I do not use these locations for Reunion and sort them differently because this is where I save downloaded items, documents, books, etc.. For Reunion, I have folders set up for each of my 4 grandparents but have multiple folders within. It just makes it easier for me to find what I am looking for.

My directory looks like this currently:
Screen Shot 2022-11-29 at 11.24.22 PM.png

Hope this helps.

[gathompson56]

Thanks Eventide. Good to see how others handle their files and directories.

Grant

[William Shaw]

My 'system' has had to be simplified over the years as software, hardware, cloud policies and my own experience/remembrance changed. Scanned photo prints are in a single drive with folders and sequential numbers by family, Each scan is captioned with any notations on the back and the drive is backed up. Assignment and further explanation is handled by Reunion Multimedia tools.

Scanned documents are pdf in a single folder named Sources, on Dropbox co-located with Reunion Family file, each named Source # one for one with Reunion Sources and included as Reunion Sources multimedia for reference on Touch.

Dropbox subscription is free this way and I have numerous older USB drives attached to my Mini.

[Kell75]

I have save all my photos and pdfs in a pictures folder in my genealogy folder that also holds my reunion file. then I have a sub folder for surnames, and then my individual photos are just beach1.jpg, beach2.jpg etc. In addition to my surname folders, I have one for "obits", "marriage docs", "death docs", "divorce docs" and whatever else. I name the files inside those "obit1.pdf" etc. I also have a folder for Cemetery which is where I put photos of headstones, and just title them cem1.jpg, cem2,jpg etc. In the past year or two I've started saving obits and marriage articles from newspapers.com as pdf's. I have death certificates scanned that I have hard copies of, but I haven't been saving an image file when it's one I've linked on ancestry.

I would like to organize all of this into a better way, because if I want to find a specific photo I have to go to the reunion file and open the photos attached there, or view the names there so I know which original image I want. Not perfect, but it's worked for me so far.

All of this is based in my dropbox and just subfolders as needed.

[Bob White]

............ because if I want to find a specific photo I have to go to the reunion file and open the photos attached there, or view the names there so I know which original image I want. .........

You don't need to open those photos to see them. Single click to select and hit the space bar for a full size preview. Hit the space bar again to make the preview disappear. Should speed up your looking a bit.

[msemans]

Solution requirements:

Reunion should be the organizational anchor to link all data
I wanted one app as a document/file/picture manager
Storing all files in native formats within Finder was a requirement (major)
Provide linkage from Reunion record to associated files
OCR (testing Prizmo) to store historical documents as native text
use scanning software that comes with Epson V600

Enter Eaglefiler (https://c-command.com/eaglefiler/)
Manage and preview all your files
Provides a “file url” to paste into Reunion for direct linkage
Stores all files within the Finder as normal files in your directory structure
Provides native text editor for workflow recording of metadata (as example) when scanning pictures that you can link to the picture file

For your collection of files, import your directories “as is” and have the benefit of Eaglefiler.
this includes your Lightroom directories

glad to dialog on the topic: mark@semans.org