Rach...on 13/03/07 you asked for the name of the rose in the bridal bouquet.
I was pretty sure i knew what it was but thought i would test my system to see how easy it was to go back in time and find it in my notes.
Before i forget...it was Cezanne...the bouquet was priced at £75.00 in 2003

Back to the records..after a few years you can end up with literally thousands of images on your pc. It makes sense to photograph as much as you can, you never know when you'll need to refer back to something, even if it's just a case of looking for ideas. It's not so bad when you've only got a few hundred pics as you probably remember most of them, when you did the piece, how much you charged etc. I've only had a digi camera for about 5 years so i hate to think what it would be like if they'd been around 20 years ago. As far as weddings go, i keep a folder for each client holding all estimates,costings, emails etc. The top level folder is 'weddings'. below this i have 4 folders, pending, confirmed, completed, cancelled. The client folders are within these. As things progress i move the folders into the next level. I also keep a word document listing all the weddings by year and this is also broken down so it shows what stage each wedding is at. Any photos i take are recorded in the client folder. I keep an excel spreadsheet for all images taken, whatever they are for i.e. weddings, funerals etc. This has fields for date taken, image title, occasion, client name, category (e.g. wedding), description (e.g. teardrop)
and a field to record any new name i might give it such as if i use it on the website and want to call it something different. The last field contains a hyperlink to the image on your hard drive.

So when someone says.."That's a nice rose..what's it called" i don't have to say "gimme a break, that was 4 years ago!"

I should be able to sort the spreadsheet by category/description and look at all the teardrop bouquets until i find out who's it was. I can then go to the client folder and get the name of the rose.

In theory this works really well. In practice...well, lets just say it takes a lot of time to keep up to date and unless you are religious about it you soon get a bit of a backlog. It also becomes a problem when you start moving images around. It wasn't so bad when all the images where in one folder, but now i've had to create so many levels just to keep things together and easy to find that it becomes a nightmare finding things. Yes, there are plenty of photo organisers available for free, but i like to do things myself and know where everything is.

So if you are just starting out and taking pics of everything, sort out a system you can get along with now. Think ahead to when you will have thousands of pics of all sorts of things. Document as much as you can. Hard drive space is cheap. You'll be ever so glad you did.