Organizing Digital Photos

Tips for Tuesday

Last week, we talked about organizing all those photos you took before the advent of digital cameras. You may still have a film camera, but most people are slowly turning to digital cameras for all their photo needs. The photos are easier to share with others, and can be edited before printing. And there's no negatives to worry about.

But we also seem to take a lot more photos because there aren't all those envelopes laying around taking up space. All we have is a little SD card. Or, perhaps a lot of SD cards. This is where organizing photos can become difficult.

Once you start taking pictures and storing them on a memory card, they just keep adding up, perhaps to the thousands if it's large storage and you use lower resolution. To keep track of them, you should download photos as soon as possible after taking them.

Create a folder on your computer for your photos. Create subfolders for all the different subjects, such as family members, special events, vacations, etc. Then as you download the photos, immediately drop them into those folders. Don't worry about editing them if you don't have the time. It's more important that they are easy to find when you need them.

After they are downloaded, back them up (automatically or manually) to an online storage site (such as Shutterfly, PhotoBucket or Flickr) or to an external hard drive. Once the backup is complete (giving you two copies of each photo), delete them from your memory card.

If you take a lot of photos, have different memory cards for different uses. For example, I have one memory card specifically for client photos. I use a second one for personal photos. If I am looking for a photo before I have a chance to download them, I know which memory card it's on.

After you have downloaded all your photos, open them, edit them, then sort them further into even more subfolders. For example, Vacation-->2012-->Spring Break Mexico, Summer Disney World etc. When you are ready to upload them to Facebook or other photo-sharing web sites, they will already be sorted and ready to go, all within one folder.