Organizing Photos

I take a lot of photos, and I've been doing that for several years. Occasionally I've thought it would be nice if they were better organized, but it always seems so painful. I've gradually developed a system that works for me, and doesn't take a lot of work.

The first step is getting photos from your camera onto your computer. I use a free app called cam2pc. It does three things I really like: 1) It copies photos from my camera to my computer and deletes them from the camera. Run it and the camera is ready to go. 2) It renames the photos with their date and time, and 3) it creates a folder for each day there are photos and puts the photos in the appropriate folder. That way each day has a separate folder and all the photos for that day are in that folder. I have the date in year-month-day order so they sort in chronological order.

That alone has helped organize my photos. I used to rename photos by hand with a description of the photo, but that's just too tedious for me.

I had cam2pc create each day's folder under My Documents\My Pictures, but over time I had dozens and dozens of folders under My Pictures. So now I create a folder for each year, and I moved all the folders into the appropriate year. When cam2pc creates a new folder, it shows up under My Pictures. I look at the photos, and then I move the day's folder under the current year. Example:

-My Documents
-   My Pictures
    + 2006
    + 2007
    - 2008
      - 2008-01-01
      - 2008-01-02

This helps file photos in manageable chunks, but it makes it hard to find a photo on a particular subject if you don't know the date. (Sometimes I find a photo by the date I mentioned something in my blog.)

Rather than rename photos, which is painful, I rename folders. I leave the date in the name, and I add a description after the date. Like this:
      - 2008-01-01 Debbie and Ringo
      - 2008-01-02 Taarka at Silver Moon

All the folders are still in chronological order, but I can now describe a day's worth of photos in one shot, and I can find photos by searching the My Pictures folder and subfolders. I just type in something like Debbie and it lists every folder that has Debbie somewhere in the folder name.

So that's my low-effort method for organizing photos. Do you have any other hints? There's always room for improvement.


Posted by Dave    Blog Tag: Opinion