With digital quickly taking over the photography world, that was once dominated by film, it is a wonder how we can possibly stay organized. The ability to take far more pictures is there, with the issues of saving them, transferring them, and most of all sorting and storing them. Here are some easy tips to help you accomplish that.
Sort photos:
It is much easier to find a photograph if you have it sorted in some way. When sorting photographs, some people like to sort the photographs by topic. While this is fine, it can be hard when you are trying to find a photograph you took and you remember what month you took it in, but not what topic you placed it in. When creating folders on your computer, sort by the year, then the month and then either sort by days or sort by events. Here is what my folders look like:
2007 is the main folder under My Pictures
Inside that folder are 12 folders that I label like this: 01 January.
The reason I place the number there is so that they stay in order when I am looking at them, otherwise if you just write January, April and August come way before it in alphabetical order.
Inside each months folder, I have the photographs sorted into folders by events.
For instance one folder reads: 01-30 Snow Storm.
Inside this folder are all the photographs I took of that snow storm. They usually have the date on them too.
Create back ups:
Do not keep all of your photographs on your hard drive. Purchase a back up drive of any type. For examples, see the computing blog. Just copy your whole MY PICTURES folder onto the drive so you have a back up copy of the photographs in case anything happens. You can also burn each years photographs onto a CDR or DVDR. Regardless of how you back them up, be sure you do. We actually have ours on each of our computers, two laptops and a 500gig back up drive. I think we’re covered. I recommend backing up at least every month.
Be Objective:
Don’t store photographs that turned out badly. Blurry, finger in the picture, camera strap, shaky, whatever the problem was, you will never use these photographs for anything. Delete them as soon as you see they are there, or take time each month to go through and delete the extras. This will save disk space on your storage device, as well as keep your photograph collections unsorted.
What tips can you share with others to make all those photographs easier to sort, organize and store?