Family Historian User Group

How do you store your photos?
I have been scanning in old photos and using for the file name, the names of the people in the photo in the order that they appear L to R. This is not very good when trying to find a particular picture later on, particularly if you cannot remeber the name order in the photo.
Photos direct from camera are stored by date and keyword but using names as keywords could also be a bit labourious. Once you have them in FH you can select/link names in FH but I would like to be able to find them out of FH as well.
Does anybody have a good system of filing / indexing photos?

ID:3813

I use Lightroom for cataloguing my photos, but any program which puts keywords back into the photo's IPTC data is fine, the advantage with recording the data to the IPTC is that most programs can read it and you can store keywords, dates, locations etc in it. So if you change cataloging tools or share a photo the information will be available.

I know Photoshop elements can also write back to the metadata, and even Windows XP/Vista can as well. I am not sure if Picassa does, but any of the cataloguing tools should IMHO.

I don't use the file names to mean much as I don't like long filenames. So they are in batches named for the owner of the photograph.

My own photos are simply named RJTxxxyyyyy where xxx is the batch and yyyyy is the number with in the batch.