This should have been a required undergraduate freshman or sophomore year class.

I think of this now as I go back through 5 years of digital images spread across 4 hard-drives and through at least 4 different filing hierarchies (where, when, who, why). Negatives are easy to sort and store. They get slipped into sleeves and clasped within the covers of 3-ring binders, labeled by date and stored away upon the shelf, sequentially. To consider fling these irreproducible material objects any other way would be prohibitively complicated, bordering on madness. If you cataloged by location or subject matter you'd be sprawled on the floor with negative sleeves, resorting your bulging-at-the-seems binders every time you got new film back from the lab.

With digital files we're not granted the luxury of such physical restrictions. Our JPEG's, our TIFF's and our PSD's don't get dusty and scratched by moving them, and - discounting the material of the hardware - the images weigh nothing. We can choose just as easily to build our filing trees based on the person we took the image of as where and when we took the photograph. We are nearly unlimited in the number of subdirectories and folders we can create. Sometimes we deem the location to be the most important factor in the photograph. Sometimes it's a set of studio images of a particular model. And then, when we go back and reuse an image from our archives for a studio class or a client, we endeavor to keep all the files for that purpose - all the edits, the versions, the originals and the scaled-down, uploadable JPEG's - all in one place so they can be found again, easily.

Then, at some point down the line you remember this file, this image... You remember a picture you shot of this one valley roadway in New Mexico while you were on a road trip with your girlfriend back in 2001. Or was it 2002. Did you store that image along with other images taken of girlfriend X, or did you file it in the New Mexico folder? Could you have scanned the image from a negative for a class and left the original filed with other images from that class? Oh, which semester was it? Fuck!

So, back to the idea of this class. Granted, everybody has their preferred way of sorting information. Everybody's mind organises data a little differently. Best methods vary, sometimes drastically, by discipline. Yet, to have a semester's class focusing on methods, means, tools and tricks for where to put your stuff, and, most importantly, learning how you best catagorize and organize, would have saved so many (including myself) so much time...

Especially now, as I go back through the last 5 years, attempting some mix of inventory and consolidation. I think I'm somewhere between Spring semester of 2005 and a Washington road-trip in Spring of 2004.