Organizing photos can be time-consuming and tedious work, but the effort pays off making browsing and locating photos far more enjoyable. When grouping and organizing your photos, you’ll likely be faced with the folders vs. albums question: What are they and how do I use them?

Most digital asset manager (DAM) applications such as Lightroom Classic and Mylio offer both folder and album organization. Learning how to leverage both in your organization efforts will make finding specific photos, and browsing through memories efficient and fun.

What are Folders?

Folders are the containers that hold your photos. Folders in a DAM typically reference actual folders on your computer and external hard drives.

Creating a personal standard for organizing your photos is the first step in making your photos easy to find. Date-based and subject-based structures are the most common. My preference is a date-based system for folders.

My folder system

I keep the working copy of my photos on an external hard drive. The top-level folder is _Angela’s Photos with sub-folders grouped by year (i.e. 2022, 2021, etc.). Inside each year, the photos are grouped by the date they were captured. I also like to add a short description of what happened that day (i.e. 2021-03-11 Julian Snow Day).

macOS date based folder structure

My DAM (I’m using Mylio) references this folder system and displays those folders in the Folders view. Using a DAM allows me to visually browse my photos instead of combing through files in Finder (macOS) or Explorer (Windows).

Using Folders vs. Albums in Mylio

What are albums?

Albums are virtual containers that let you organize images into groups. One photo can be assigned to multiple albums, allowing you to organize your images in a variety of ways without physically moving the files or creating multiple copies.

NOTE: Most DAMs use the term album, but Lightroom Classic calls virtual containers Collections. Collections in Lightroom Classic serve the same purpose as albums in Mylio, LuminarAI, etc.

Using Folders vs. Albums in Mylio

Using albums

There are several ways you can use Albums to organize your photos. Here are a few examples:

Scenario 1: You capture a photo of a gorgeous flower on your trip to Italy. You could create two albums: Flowers and Italy Vacation, and have your flower photo in both albums.

Scenario 2: You do a photoshoot for a client. You could create a top-level album for the shoot itself with all of the images, and then create sub-albums for those you need to edit and those that are ready to deliver to the client.

Scenario 3: Photos of your children catalog the important moments of their life. You could create an album for each child by name, an album for birthdays and other albums for special life events.

No matter your photographic genre or workflow, albums can provide an additional layer of organization for your photos.

Folders vs. albums in practice

The decision to work with Folders vs. Albums depends on where you are in your workflow. Folders are the first level of organization and determine the physical location that stores your image files. Albums are the second (third, etc.) level allowing you to group your photos by subject, event, task and more.

Grouping and organizing your photos becomes increasingly important as your photo library grows. Scattered, unorganized folders make images hard to find and browse. Taking the time to set up an organized folder system — and using it — will make a huge difference. Incorporating Albums allows you incredible flexibility to group your photos in countless ways to help you find your precious memories when you want them.