How to Organize Your Digital Photographs
The best thing about digital cameras: it’s easy to take thousands of pictures. The worst thing about digital cameras: it’s easy to take thousands of pictures. After you’ve used your camera for a few months, you’ll have thousands of files and you won’t be able to find that great picture you took a couple of months ago, if those files aren’t well organized.
What should you do to organize and catalogue your photos? Here are some tips to help you clean up the clutter, and enjoy your digital memories:
- Download a free image organizer. Picasa from Google is an easy-to-use photo management tool.
- Organize in folders. Folders are the best way to organize groups of pictures. In your My Pictures folder, create a sub-folder for each year: 2009, 2010, 2011, and so on. This might seem a lot for the first year you own your camera, but after five years, you’ll be glad you did. You can go back to your 2009 folder and find a picture from the vacation you took that year. When you transfer your photos from your camera to your computer, immediately put them into a folder on your hard drive — not just My Pictures, but create a subfolder by date (use reverse date format e.g. 2007-06-26 which is listed better by computers ordering files by name), event name or both.
- Tag your photos. With your pictures imported into Picasa, you can begin the tagging process. What is a tag? Tagging is a concept found in many types of data-management tools. You attach descriptive text called tags (e.g. ‘Uncle Joe’, ‘Robert’s Birthday’, ‘School Play’), to each photo in your collection. When you do this, you no longer need to worry about remembering a picture’s filename, folder or date. All the need is the tag that you used.
- Regularly back up your photos. Within Picasa, there is a function to backup your photo catalogue. All database information (in particular, tag information) will be backed up as well. Use a CD or DVD burner or an external hard drive to store the backup. Put your CD or DVD into a box, holder, or album so you know where it is and have easy access.
Organizing your pictures logically is a good practice that pays off later when you need to find a particulary picture. Follow these tips, and you’ll have a computer full of easy-to-find pictures.
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maybe you should have a real photo album, just print your best photos and keep it in a photo album, don’t let your computer keep all of your precious photos alone