Organization
The folder is not the thought
The filesystem habit taught us to file everything in folders. But a folder is a physical constraint: a file lives in only one place at a time. Yet a photograph often belongs to several intellectual sets at once, an assignment, an exhibition selection, a theme. Trying to express all of that with folders always ends in unmanageable duplication. The fix isn’t to organize folders better, but to separate four concepts we tend to conflate.
Folder: the physical location
The folder answers one question: where is the file stored? It’s an address on a disk. Useful for technical organization (by medium, by import date), it shouldn’t carry the meaning of the work on its own. The same assignment can even be spread across several disks without changing what it is.
Project: the unit of work
The project is an intellectual and editorial unit: a commission, an assignment, a year of personal work. It has a life cycle (draft, active, archived) and gathers images that share a production context, even if, physically, they live on several volumes.
Collection: the cross-cutting grouping
The collection gathers images by intent, regardless of their project or source folder. An exhibition selection, a portfolio, a thematic corpus. A collection can be manual (you pick the images), smart (a rule gathers them automatically: every 5-star image tagged “sea”), or nested. Crucially, an image joins a collection without being moved or duplicated.
Series: the author’s coherence
The series is an authorial notion: a set that makes sense as a whole, sometimes drawn from several sessions, sometimes from a single shoot. It may overlap a project, or cut across it.
Five concrete cases
- An assignment spread across three disks: one project, several physical locations.
- A series drawn from several sessions: one series, several production projects.
- An exhibition selection pulled from ten projects: a cross-cutting manual collection.
- A theme (“night,” “portraits”): a collection, possibly smart.
- An image in three selections: present in three collections, stored once.
In practice
- Use folders for physical storage, not to express meaning.
- Reserve the project for the unit of production.
- Use collections for any cross-cutting grouping, without duplicating.
- Let the series express authorial coherence, even across projects.
Obscura Flow explicitly separates these levels: projects with a life cycle, and manual, smart, and nested collections, all without moving originals. The same photograph can belong to several sets while being stored only once. The structure follows your thinking, not the other way around.