Organization
Don’t reclassify everything at once
Facing twenty years of images scattered across external drives, forgotten cards, and a few cloud folders, the temptation runs two ways: reorganize everything in one sweep, or do nothing out of discouragement. Both fail. The right approach is incremental: make the collection legible first, before making it perfect. You don’t reclassify twenty years in a weekend, you start by knowing what you have.
1. Inventory your media
Before touching a single file, list every storage medium: drives, NAS, cards, cloud folders, old computers. For each, note its capacity, apparent condition, and roughly what it holds. This inventory is your map, you don’t tidy a territory you haven’t charted. The oldest or most tired media become an immediate backup priority.
2. Find duplicates and risk zones
Twenty years of successive copies inevitably produce duplicates, often useful (they’re backups), sometimes misleading (divergent versions of the same folder). Spot them by checksum rather than by name, and distinguish:
- true duplicates (identical bytes), confirming redundancy;
- false twins (same name, different content), hiding a divergence to resolve;
- risk zones: a single drive with no copy, old proprietary formats, media that’s making noise.
3. Gather without moving prematurely
Classic mistake: starting by copying everything to one place “to sort it out.” You multiply duplicates and break existing landmarks. Better to first reference media where they are, get a unified view, then decide on moves with full knowledge. You move originals once, deliberately, not three times in a panic.
4. Structure projects and collections
Once you have the overview, give it structure: projects (a commission, an assignment, a year) and cross-cutting collections (a selection, a theme) that span several projects without duplicating images. The intellectual structure doesn’t have to copy the folder tree; it should reflect how you think about your work.
5. Document progressively
No need to caption everything at once. Document by priority batch: the valuable corpora first (notable commissions, personal series), filling in the few fields that matter, title, author, date, location, rights. The rest can wait; what matters is that value isn’t lost for want of context.
6. Archive in coherent batches
When a set is sorted and documented, freeze it: create an archive per coherent batch (a project, a year, a series), documented and verifiable, that you won’t modify again. You turn a shifting collection into a series of stable blocks, handled at your own pace.
In practice
- Map your media before moving anything.
- Handle duplicates by checksum, not by name.
- Gather the view first, the files later.
- Progress by priority batch rather than tackling 200,000 images at once.
Obscura Flow is built for this incremental reclaiming: bringing heterogeneous media into one legible view, projects, collections, imports, without prematurely moving originals, then archiving batch by batch. The goal isn’t to tidy everything by tomorrow, but to stop losing anything from today.