Organizing your Digital Photos

While it is much cheaper these days that we all have digital cameras and, based on the size of your memory card, can take pictures to your hearts content. This is wonderful until I realize that I have hundreds of images on my computer and have a hard time trying to remember where I stored the images from my Dad's 70th birthday party or my Niece's dance recital.

It took me a while but I have finally come up with an organizational system on my computer that makes sense and makes it easy for me to find my images in multiple ways. When I finally decided to use this system I spent an afternoon organizing all of my images (I do have a bit more than the average person, since my camera is attached to my hip after all ;).

Here are a few tips on how I organize my images on my computer, maybe this will help you too.

1. Start by creating new folders in your My Pictures folder for each year (ex. 2013, 2012, 2011. . .)

2. Within each of these folders I create a folder for each month and label it with both the year and the month. I label with the year first and the month by using a two digit number so they are sorted in order (ex. 2013-01 for January, 2013-02 for February, etc.)

3. From here I start moving my images or folders of images into the appropriate year and month. As needed I label the small folders with titles of events. Ex. Dads 70th Birthday, Taylors Recital, etc. During this process I found that I had many duplicates on my  computer so I was able to delete these duplicates and open up more storage space on my hard drive. Woo Hoo!! Room for more pictures :)

4. Rename images based on either date or event name. Now some people will tell you to never rename your images, but I believe that this way you can search for your images faster. Example, I rename all my images in the file for Taylor Recital to be "Taylor Recital 01," "Taylor Recital 02," and so on. Now when I want to find my images I can either find them by going through the folders based on date or I can search  my computer by key words that these images are now saved as.

So there it is. An easy way to organize your images and to continue to organize as the years go on. It is very important that you back up all your images. There are horror stories about computers crashing and people losing all documents and images that are on their computer. While it seems like these stories are few and far between, you never want it to happen to you. So I have an external hard drive that I duplicate all my pictures to. This way if something were to happen to my computer I will still have those memories.

And one last thought. . . Don't forget to print those pictures!!! With everything being digital we are so fast to take lots of pictures but forget to have anything printed to put on our walls or make an album to show off. One easy tip I have started to do for my husband and I is to make an album of images from each year. So I have an album of all our pictures from 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 will soon be printing. Don't you want to look at all those fun memories that are replaying in your head! Happy Organizing!