Organizing Your Digital Photos
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.
Saving Digital Photos to CD or DVD
Film Negatives - Storing your photos or negatives for safekeeping, i.e. archiving them, was pretty simple in the film days. Many get put into an album, but most of them in end up a shoe box and stashed in a closet or somewhere else. Pull them out every now then when family is over for some fun memories. Decades later they end up with the next generation. Pictures and negatives may be faded, but they’re still there.
Digital Files - There is no such thing as a faded digital image, it’s either there or not. If a hard drive fails it may be possible to recover files, sometimes at great expense, but that’s not a sure thing. For this reason it’s imperative that your copy your digital photos to a more stable media such as CDs or DVDs.
CD or DVD Drive - Most computers nowadays come with combination CD/DVD read/write drives built in. If you have an older computer it may only have a CD read/write drive, and if really old (as far as computers are concerned) it may have only a CD ROM drive (read only), or none at all. If that’s the case you have a few options.
- Have a CD/DVD read/write drive installed (if your computer is compatible)
- Have a USB card installed (if not already there) and get an external USB CD/DVD read/write drive
- Buy a new computer
CD or DVD Durability - Remember the fading photos and negatives? CDs and DVDs have similar issues, primarily because of chemical decomposition of the media. As the CD or DVD break down chemically over time sections will become unreadable. It’s very difficult if not impossible to reconstruct a digital image with missing bits.
Archive Grade CD and DVD - These are not your ‘50 for $9.99′ pack run of the mill CDs and DVDs. Archive grades incorporate gold (yes gold) for maximum resistance to chemical breakdown. Expected life under proper storage conditions is measured in 100s of years. This is what you want to use. Currently they cost around a couple of dollars a piece if you buy a 10 pack.
Frequency of Backups - I normally do it once a year during the Christmas holidays, as I’m typically on vacation hanging around the house. You may have another time of the year where you end up with some idle time. When you do your back-up, you should obviously back up everything since your last back up. I typically overlap previous back-ups i.e not only last year, but the year before also (which was backed up a year ago).
Final Considerations - You should avoid schemes which involve some proprietary software to ‘restore’ the files back to the computer they came from. Ten years from now you will likely neither have that computer nor that software anymore, and probably not the same operating system either. Fortunately most backup software will write a disk using a ‘plain UDF’ file format as long as you choose to ‘create a data disk’. This will assure that the files are readable in most operating systems, current and hopefully future.
Sharing Your Photos On A Home Network
USB hard drives - USB hard drives have become widely accepted for external storage of computer files making them ideal for storing your digital pictures. Plug them into your computer’s USB port, power up, and you have huge amounts of additional storage space. This is an easy method to store (and backup) your digital pictures. Unfortunately if you have multiple computers around your house and want to view your photos on another computer, you need to power down the USB hard drive, unplug it, move it to the other computer, plug it in, and then power it up again. A cumbersome process. There are other options.
Sharing USB hard drive via networked host computer - One is to set up a network, and then find a way to get your USB hard drive connected to the network. There are several methods to accomplish this. For example you could keep your USB hard drive permanently connected to one of the networked computers (acting as a host) and ’share’ the drive with a client computer, networked using either ethernet or wireless. For info on how to share a hard drive look here (technical version) and here (simplified version). There have been reports of problems sharing USB hard drives where the ’share’ feature is lost after a reboot of the host computer. My tests using a host and client (laptop ) both running Windows XP however showed that the host did keep the USB hard drive shared even after a reboot, and the client computer had no problems accessing it.
USB hard drive network adapters - Another option is to use a device that can turn USB dri into NAS devices, but most appear to have some short comings. These range from inability to handle drives larger than 250 gb, to inability to read or write NTFS file systems, and may even require you to reformat the USB drive with a Linux file system. You definitely don’t want to do that as it will make the drive unusable should you want to simply plug it back into your Windows computer. This is still emerging technology so verify that your USB hard drive will work with the adapter before buying.
Network Attached Storage - If you are starting from scratch your best bet to minimize potential problems is to get a network ready hard drive, also known as NAS, which are starting to become more common. These can be plugged into any network switch and essentially act like another computer on your network. Typically you will need to install software which comes with the hard drive on every computer that will be accessing it. You should install only what’s absolutely necessary and opt out of all the other things they want you to install, which usually are outdated versions of something you probably already have (Adobe Reader for example), or trial ware which will start pestering you in short order to buy the full version.
Note that some NAS hard drives have a USB connection which allows you connect USB drive into the network drive in a piggyback arrangement. The diagram below shows typical configurations for either a shared USB hard drive or a NAS drive.
