Organizing Your Digital Photos

May 10, 2008

Why You Need To Organize - Storing your digital photos sounds pretty straightforward. Just copy them to your computer, right? If you’re only going to accumulate a couple hundred pictures pretty much any system you use will probably work. However if you’ve switched exclusively to digital cameras and will be using them for years to come, you could accumulate thousands of pictures. In this case if you don’t use an organized approach you could end up with snarled up mess, making it difficult to find pictures, and confusing to back up to a CD or DVD.

Photo Storage Philosophy - There are many software packages available both free and for a price that will ‘manage’ your photos for you. However before you turn over control of your photos to these you should consider a few things. Will you be using this software a few years from now? What if you decide to use something different in a couple of years? Will you lose your organizational setup and have to start over again creating categories? How will you back them up? Per some scheme laid out by the photo management software? For this and other reasons it’s best if you use a software independent underlying structure for organizing your photos. This is not to say that you shouldn’t use some photo management software. More on that later. However whatever software you use should be used on top of your basic file structure setup, not take the place of it.

Transfer Your Digital Photos To Your Computer - Shortly after you stick the memory card into your computer’s built in or attached card reader (via USB), a dialog box will open and ask what you want to do with the photo files. Depending on what type of software is installed on your computer, you may have an application determine what happens (import into photo album for example), or have the operating system import your photos into the ‘My Photos’ folder, or simply copy everything to a folder of your choice (you can create one at this point).

Setting Up A Photo Folder Structure - The simplest approach which will make it easiest in the future for home network sharing, cataloging, and backing up, is to copy your photos into a folder which you’ve already created, or create during this process. For ease of maintenance it is best if all photos are stored under a master folder, with sub folders created as needed. For example you may create a folder anywhere on your computer’s hard drive named ‘Photos’, but probably best under the ‘My Documents’ folder. Personally I’m leery of using the Windows ‘My Pictures’ folder as Windows has a tendency to interject itself into the process of interacting with this folder whether now or in the future, with sometimes undesirable side results.

Naming Your Photo Folders - The next question becomes what to name your folders. Most people name their folders based on attributes associated with the photos (Joe’s Birthday Party, Baby Pictures, etc.), however in a short while you will find your main folder jumbled, or start to run out of names to give to folders. Often the photos on the memory card may be a random collection, and ’sending’ photos into appropriate folders is not an option during the upload process.

Date Based Naming Of Your Photo Folders - The system I’ve found the most useful is to create folders by year (such as 2007, 2008, etc.) under your main ‘Photos’ folder. Next create sub folders as needed using numerical names such as 07-03, 07-04, the 07 standing for the year, and the 04 standing for the month. Why the 0 in front of the year abbreviation (after all, it’s stored in the appropriate years’ folder) or month number? There are several reasons.

1) Your folders will be displayed in correct chronological order when viewed with Explorer using ’sort by name’, i.e. alphabetical. If you don’t use the 0s, folders will be in the order of 1,11,12,2,3, etc., putting November and December between January and February. With the 0s the order will be 08-01,08-02,..,08-11,08-12.

2) By having the year associated with the folder you know where it came from should you or someone else misplace it via a drag a drop accident.

3) When you back up your folders to CDs or DVDs, you back up the newest folders. For example last six months of 08. Older ones are already backed up. If you were to keep adding pictures to your ‘Baby Pictures’ folder, you’ll be backing up older photos over and over (not a bad idea but multiple backups is a different topic).

Extending Your Date Based Folder Labels - So you don’t like the idea of numbers alone for naming your folders? Neither do I. Simply add a description after the numbers. For example, 07-12-Friends-Wedding, 08-01 Baby Pictures, or just plain 08-02 if you can’t think of a description. With this approach you can have multiple Baby Pictures, Joe’s Birthday, and so on folders, with an associated year and month, mixed with folders which are just plain date based, all arranged in chronological order. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

Photo Management Software - Once you have your photos stored on your computer you can point your favorite photo management software at the new folders and catalog your photos with tags and descriptions. The are many packages available with costs ranging from zero to several hundred dollars. Some are geared towards basic management and editing, whereas others provide sophisticated indexing and editing features. A good starting package is Google’s Picasa. For more advanced features consider some of the packages offered by Adobe.

Comments