About Standards and Best Practices
for Digital Photo and Video Organizing
About Standards
I, Meg Macintyre, the owner of Photo Organizing Stuff and Megabyte Memories, am developing a set of Standards for professionals who organize digital photo and video collections for clients.
I propose that these Standards be regarded as minimum requirements for all Professional Photo Organizers and Photo Managers to know how to achieve when organizing clients’ digital photo and video collections. Individual Standards may have different limitations and exceptions.
While Standards may be difficult to achieve, being able to achieve a Standard is what makes a Photo Organizer or Photo Manager a Professional.
Standards are typically established by an industry’s governing body, but there is no governing body for the field of Professional Photo Organizing / Photo Management.
I invite any Professional Photo Organizer or Photo Manager to contact me about these Standards, as I expect there are errors and omissions. I hope to collaborate with other professionals to improve them.
Related Standards
There is considerable overlap between the Standards Deliver Accurately Dated Photos to Clients and Preserve Information Added by Clients.
The most significant overlap concerns preserving date information in folder names and filenames.
When preserving information added by clients to folder names and filenames, remember that preserving date information is equally important.
About Best Practices
Best Practices are methods and techniques that will help Professional Photo Organizers and Photo Managers achieve a Standard.
Following Best Practices to meet a Standard may require a certain level of skill and expertise and the use of specific applications.
While there may be several ways to achieve a Standard, Best Practices will help professionals achieve a Standard efficiently, and being able to organize clients’ digital photo collections efficiently is an important aspect of professionalism.
Intellectual Property & Copyright
These Best Practices are a result of testing I have been doing since 2017. They are my intellectual property and are protected by copyright.
I have always held myself to a very high overall standard when organizing photo and video collections for clients, but meeting my own standards proved to be very difficult and inefficient with the applications commonly used by Professional Photo Organizers and Photo Managers.
To achieve my own standards, I do extensive testing of applications for both Mac and PC in search of any feature of any application that will enable me to do a task more accurately, thoroughly, and efficiently. The Best Practices I have created are a result of that extensive testing and are not based on opinion.