Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Organizing your digital photos



Growing up as a child my Mom took TONS of pictures! Those where the days when digital camera's didn't exist and you never took more then one photo of the same thing in hopes of getting the perfect shot b/c you had to develop every single picture on the film. Well, with all that developing my Mom collected quite the assortment of photos. Even with having the best of intentions, my Mom never got them all into photo albums and through the years made their way into a brown paper sack that stayed in the back of the closet.

Guess who organized them and put them into corresponding photo boxes labeled by year a couple of years ago? ME!

So when I gave birth to my son I resolved to never have my pictures unorganized.

Lucky me, we are in the digital age so keeping photos in order is a cinch, but still a little work.

I own one photo-card that holds about 500 pictures on it.
Guess who sometimes takes 500 pictures a month?

Needless to say I am always loading them onto my computer and then backing up the files. To make it easy and to keep everything in chronological order I neatly put the photos in corresponding files. That way when its time for me to scrapbook Joey's annual scrapbook I have the files in order. That way when I upload them to a photo printing site they come to me in order and ready to be put into a scrapbook.

Here is my digital file organization system.


My main page of "My Pictures" folder looks like this.
It's hard to tell but the files are labeled 2005-2010 and there is also some photo book files in with it along with digital scrapbooking files.



Then each picture (I typically organize photos into each folder on a weekly basis) goes into it's corresponding year and month.
Again the picture it too small to see the words, but in my 2009 file I have 12 folders, one for each month of the year and 2 extra folders with some misc. picture files.



I know this sounds kind of like a no brainer, but it is What Works For Me! I have seen other people's computers who have file names for pictures but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. By using this system it keeps me from having to individually label every single picture with the date, b/c we all know that the time stamp on our digital camera's don't work half the time!

4 comments:

  1. what a great way to organize photos Love it!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for sharing this method. I have been kind of going crazy juggling digital photos for my blogs and I've only in my 3rd month of blogging! I'm a new follower (your blog is very pretty) and I'd love for you to come see me on my blogs, too!

    sceneofthegrime.blogspot.com
    lauriesfoodfiles.blogspot.com

    Take care!

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  3. Thank you! I am a professional organizer by trade but struggle in the digital realm- this will be very helpful to me instead of scrolling through a bazillion photos like I do now lol

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  4. but even if i organize i can never find the picture i want for a blog post.

    what i need is face recognition software.

    ReplyDelete