Organizing Footages As A Time Lapse Photographer

As a time lapse shooter you will have to deal with lots of photos or what we called assets in the industry. Yes every clicks is an asset, a digital assets. But how do I organise it and that’s the topic of today post.

Each time I going out on the field, I could potentially come back with over 1000 photos and videos. That’s roughly 30 seconds of time lapse video. Yes all that hard work and you only have 30 seconds of video. That’s why not many time lapse shooter out there, but they missed out.

When I came back from the field I’m immediately backup my footages into a hard-drive. I use Adobe Bridge for this task. It’s a free software from Adobe. I’m not editing any thing on Bridge but simply use it to organise my assets.

Bridge can reads every files you throw at it so it pretty simple to organise and you can see what you have visually which is good. The other benefit of Bridge is you can badge rename files.

Naming convention is a term you have to get use to in photography. Basically there’s a few theory out there on how you name your files. For me the simplest way I could find my files is by 1)Name/Location 2) Year 3) Month and 4) XXXX four digits. Example: Cambodia_SiemRiep_AngkorWat_2017_08_0001.

Some people just use date and I find it hard to retrieve the files once you do that. On my file explorer I simply look for the name of the file and within seconds I have achieve my task. Imagine going through the date of your file/folder structure to find what you’re looking for.

As a time lapse shooter we have to organise our files in a way that it easier for other and ourselves to find later. The naming convention above is recommended. But we have more than just time lapse photos right?

For me I organise it in 4 folders structure. 1) Photos 2) TL_Photos 3)Videos 4)Audio if I record audio separately from my main camera. Yes we need to deal with audio as well if you want to become more proficient as a time lapse/ video/film producers.

If you organise as above then for you the editing task will be simpler. Or you could simply hand the hard-drive to an editor and your done. But for me I am a one man show so I have to do every thing. But the above example is a great time savings tips for you as well as your editor if you working in a team.