How to organize a collection of JPEG's stored on a hard drive, floppies, tape,
CD or distributed over a number of these, usually about a common
topic such as porn, cartoons, anime, animals, food,
sports or some such. This is just one way of doing it for a large part
of your hard drive.
One Way of Organizing a JPEG Collection
Part One: A Basic Hierarchy
Let's say the collection consists of anime pictures from various series
horked off the net. The "key" here is the series name. Now some anime
series have more than one name, an English and Japanese name and maybe
more than one name in both languages. So if I start with a small collection,
I might start with a modest set of series names organized under a home
directory called "anime":
And in each of the series directories I'd put the images for each series.
Part Two: Unsorted Images, Links
Now, this is fine if the collection is small. But any modest amount of
collecting will add images that are from series I don't know or can't
remember. So I'd want an "unsorted" directory to put those in. I call
my unsorted directory "__unsorted" to put at the top of the list.
Gunbuster has the Japanese name "Toppo o Narae", and Evangelion's
full title is "Neon Genesis Evangelion". So I might want to add directories
called "Neon Genesis Evangelion (see Evangelion)" and "Toppo o Narae (see
Gunbuster)" that are merely placeholders. On Linux, you
can make a symbolic link to them. So my hierarchy would look like this:
- anime
- __unsorted
- Armitage III
- Card Captor Sakura
- Evangelion
- Gunbuster
- Neon Genesis Evangelion (see Evangelion)
- Slayers
- Toppo o Narae (see Gunbuster)
- Vandread
Part Three: Alphabetic Organization
After a while I had images from more than a few dozen series, and wanted
to be break up the number of sub-directories to make things a bit more manageable.
So I decided to split them based on alphabetical order, keeping the number of
sub-directories in any directory around 6.
g_to_m
n_to_s
- n
- Neon Genesis Evangelion (see Evangelion)
- s
t_to_z
- t
- Toppo o Narae (see Gunbuster)
- v
The general format of a directory path in these scheme would look like:
anime\a_to_f\a\Anime Title\*.jpg
or
anime\a_to_f\a\an\Anime Title\*.jpg
Part Four: Extending to different subject areas
You can extend this system for sports, and use countries as a higher
level key and individual athletes or teams as a second key. For gymnastics
I use the following scheme:
gymnastics\t_to_z\u\usa\g_to_m\g\gy\Gymnast, A\1998\usn\fx\*.jpg
In this case I have so many gymnasts listed I need to split the alpha
hierarchy 3 times, into quarter-alphabets, then letters, then the first 2 letters of
the last name so all the directories between the emboldened directory names
are just placeholders. Then I use the year, a competition code,
and an apparatus code to further divide the images into manageable subsets.
I also place __unsorted directories liberally wherever I need them.
I also use _soc for those pics that aren't of competitions, and within that
_portrait, _pose and _art for wallpapers
and drawings.
For MP3's I use the following scheme:
music\n_to_s\r\ru\Rush\albums\2112\*.mp3
if possible, or
music\n_to_s\r\Rush\*.mp3
Part Five: The Generic Alpha-Based Scheme
topic name \
(a_to_f | g_to_m | n_to_s | t_to_z) \
(a|b|..|z) \
(a|b|..|z)(a|b|..|z)? \
custom topic based scheme
Part Six: Coordinating Different Subject Areas
Now it gets much more difficult as you have so many ways to chose
the directories that hold the subject areas together.
I could use a subject based approach like Google does:
or a media-first organization, but I've
found that more difficult to use.