Bridge? Lightroom? MY Overthinking Is Having a Party! It's Time To Organize 30 Years of Photoshop

@kathydannelvitcak 

One thing to remember is when you place images into InDesign, you're placing a link to the original image with the original name and the original location. If you rename or move the image, you will break the link and cause more damage. One thing you might consider is to package the InDesign files and include the fonts, images, a PDF, and an IDML file.

Jane

I'd use a chatGPT script in Python to assist me in organizing all that. Huge time-saver. 

Selling the business?   I'd put everything on a hard drive or two and say "Good luck"---- seriously- if you are selling your business just step away- if after 30 years your "hot mess of files" is just that- a hot mess- it's nothing you need to worry about.    Anyone buying a business probably has the skill, or knows people how to fix / organize the data.

On the low end you would pay about $50 and hour to have someone do it for you.   Now think of the time you would spend trying to fix 30 years worth of your graphics--- you wouldn't fix it-- you will spend time trying and kinda sorta get things a little bit discombobulated- but they probably would be a hot mess.

Me?  As is all the data-   Could be worth lets say $5,000 of the selling price of the business.

When I sold image sets on my website I  had everything ortganized, catorgorized, grouped, and have backups of it to this day- and It's been 7 years- but it's  just a little ober 22,000 images.   9TB   is more like three or 4 average public libraries of data.

 Bottom line:  Just walk away- 'hand the buyer the keys"  and walk away.   

I forgot to address the fact that you mentioned Lightroom in your thread title. I organize all my photos in Lightroom Classic, and the book I suggested (The DAM Book) is built around Lightroom Classic, but the reason I didn’t mention it for you is that you also mentioned InDesign. Lightroom Classic won’t work then because it catalogs only photos and videos.

That’s what makes Bridge potentially useful for this specific scenario: Because Bridge needs to support many Creative Cloud apps, Bridge works with a wide range of file types including photos, videos, HTML files, and documents by InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects, and more.

You tagged your question with “macOS” so I’lll also mention that there are some other Mac apps such as Neofinder that work sort of like Bridge, in that they can help organize many file types. But they won’t be as useful with Creative Cloud features as Bridge. For example, when you select an InDesign document in Bridge, the Metadata panel in Bridge can list what linked files, fonts, and document color swatches are used in that document.

The place to start is the reason why you need to organize them. If it’s for the business, then you might start by deciding what would be the best organization for the business. How do people need to find stuff? For example, do they need to find the images and InDesign documents by breed, product, containers, brand, etc? Also, do you need to organize the files in a way that works well with your existing accounting or inventory/sales system, like SKUs or Amazon ASINs?

You can think through this stage of organization with a pencil and paper before you do anything on the computer. 

Then you can use the Keywords panel in Adobe Bridge to create a set of keywords based on the organization you worked out. So you could assign keywords to a picture like “dog, powder, flea” or something like that. Another image might have keywords like “cat, ointment”.

Once keywords are assigned in Bridge, a lot of other things become easier. For example, you could use the Collections panel in Bridge to create lists of related files. You could use keyword searches to help you find pictures and InDesign files to drag into different collections named “cream” or “powder" or "beagle". Even better you could create a Smart Collection (like a saved search) so that the images gather themselves: For example, create a Smart Collection that looks for images and InDesign documents with the keyword combination of “cream” and "beagle" keywords, and the Smart Collection will become an automatic list of all files of skin creams for beagles, collected from all folders on the computer.

A possible book that might help: The DAM Book by expert Peter Krogh

DAM stands for Digital Asset Management

Blimey Kathy.  8 to 9TB?  I think there are tools out there that would recognise duplicates, which would simplyfy the task to some extent.

My DAM (Digital Asset Management)) is to use Groups (Windows) with:

Year_month_Day Meaningful name

Because that will list them in date created order.  I leave the files within with the name the camea gave them, if they are photographs, but they will have project names if appropriate.

I'm a big fan of Creative Cloud Libraries. When I did client work I would have a CC Library group for each client. Tht contained fonts, colour swatches, gradients, layer styles, often individual image elements.  I liked the view in web option as a way to see the whole thing.  It is like cloud storage of course, and viewable anywhere.  Not so good with 8TB though.

Bridge has a useful rename tool.  (it won't show unless you have files selected.

I hope you get some better ideas posted, because I don't envy you this job.