10 Tips to Keep Your Digital Photos Organized
Over the years, your photo collection will swell to the tens of thousands, you’ll migrate from one computer to another, you’ll go through several different cameras and industry formats will change.
Fortunately, organizing your digital photos has become easier and easier, thanks to new automation tools. But you still need to pitch in.
Follow these tips to keep track of your memories through all the changes.
1) Set your camera to the correct date and time
This simple step will permanently tag every photo with the correct date, allowing you to search and sort chronologically for all posterity. And if you often import other people’s photos to your own library, make sure their cameras are set correctly too!
2) Delete the junkers as soon as you take them
Fight the instinct that says every photo is precious, because in reality, bad photos are just clutter,making it harder to find the good ones. Delete them from the camera. Over your lifetime, you will thank yourself for keeping the collection manageable.
3) Know where your photos go
Put all your pictures in the same folder, such as your PC’s existing “Pictures” folder. One universal folder means that photos will be easy to back up and move to a new PC for years to come. Override any attempts by your camera’s software to store them in a proprietary folder on your drive.
4) Use a sub-foldering system
Within your “Pictures” folder, organize your photos into sub-folders that will make sense over the long-term. A common method is by year – 2010, 2011, etc., and inside those, more sub-folders by month, topic (Little League), and event (vacation). Or, rely on tags instead for organizing by that sub-level of detail, as explained below.
5) Backup your photos
Make sure your photos are stored in at least two locations, such as your own PC and an external drive. External drives are relatively inexpensive now. For added safety in case of fire or theft, also store photos at a reputable online photo site, such as Shutterfly, SmugMug, or Flickr, or a online backup service, such as Dropbox or Carbonite.
6) Give star-ratings to your best photos
Each time you import photos from your camera, give star ratings to the best photos in each batch. Most image management packages use a 5-star system. These let you quickly find your best photos in the future.
7) Use image management software to tag and find photos
Excellent image management software is downloadable for free, such as Google’s Picasa or Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery, and Apple’s iPhoto comes pre-installed on Macs. These help you navigate your collection easily. You can further hone your searching with “tags”, keywords you apply in the software to photos, such as “Summer Vacation”. Most tags will stay with the image and remain searchable, regardless of which brand of software you're using, thanks to emerging industry standards. Image management software is your gateway to helpful tools like face recognition, geo-tagging and more.
8) Make use of People tags
Facial recognition is a breakthrough technology included free with the image management software mentioned. It uses advanced intelligence to find faces in photos and guess who the people are—an incredible time saver. No need to manually tag every person in all your photos and searching your archive to find someone’s photo is now a snap.
9) Print an annual photo book
Search on your star ratings to instantly call up your best shots of the year, and choose a service such as Blurb, Shutterfly, Hotprints or Snapfish to print them in an annual photo book. Regardless of what happens to digital standards over the decades, the printed photo book will always be viewable by anyone, anytime.
10) Form good habits
Just like brushing your teeth or doing the laundry on a schedule, photos require basic maintenance habits. Getting in the habit means having access to all your photos in the coming years.
Updated October 2011
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An added note for readers
An added note for readers about online storage as a backup: don’t assume the online site will be a backup of your photos in case of a hard drive crash.
Warning for Facebook Users: Facebook only stores a tiny version of your photo, not the original. To save time and bandwidth, your photos are reduced on your PC by the Facebook application before uploading. The resulting Facebook photo is barely enough to make a 4” x 6” print that isn’t very sharp. And how would you download all those Facebook images in case of disaster? Right-click-and-save each one? No, too tedious. Some third-party vendors like Snapfish offer photo printing or CD-burning services from Facebook photos, but their quality is limited to the tiny Facebook image. You will be sorely disappointed if this is the only record of your photos.
Other online sites, like Shutterfly, are in the business of selling prints, so they do store the high-resolution version of your image. It’s free to store there (more or less, rules vary), but you’ll have to pay the piper if you ever want to get those full-resolution images back. Still, it’s a comfort to know your photos are there “in the cloud” as another backup, and if everything else is lost, those memories will be priceless.
Or, you could opt for a paid service that gives you and your designated friends unlimited access to your full-resolution images throughout the year. If you want to access and share photo files regularly, the cost may be worth the ease and convenience.
Response to Hope: You're
Response to Hope: You’re ahead of the game by using Smugmug for online sharing! Smugmug charges an annual fee, but in return you get not only full-featured sharing, but you and your designated friends get full access to your digital original-resolution photos.
For software decisions, I always recommend going with the most popular and widely-used applications for just about anything, because you know they’ll be well-supported by the many users demanding it. Hence, the two applications hotlinked in item #7 in this article are both excellent choices. Both will let you sort on your starred photos and upload the results instantly to a photo-book-producing supplier. Windows Live Gallery lets you create a link directly to Smugmug; Picasa links to many other suppliers.
Thanks for the article!
From Hope on November 10, 2010 :: 1:44 pm
Thanks for the article! Now that I have two kids, I am really struggling to keep all the photos organized. We tend to take them, dump them into IPhoto and never see them again. I like the tip about a yearly album - now I just need to do it!
One question - I use IPhoto and would like to move everything from IPhoto to a PC based application. Any suggestions? I use Smugmug to store photos online, but would like an app on the computer to use as well.
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