How to Organize Your Photos

How to organize your photos depends a lot on how you use your photos. It also depends on whether you are trying to organize printed pictures or digital photos. Since most people now take digital pictures we are going to focus on the organization of those photos. If you can find a digital photo then you can get a printed copy of that photo. I know that this doesn't help those of you who have piles of printed photos that you can never find -- if you want to turn you old printed photos into scanned photos please read my section on scanning.

Photo organizer hint: Use picture to help organize pictures.

Many times it is hard to remember where you were when you took a particular photo. Since you can take as many pictures as you want with a digital camera, just snap a picture of anything that will help you identify your location. You can later use this to help you figure out where pictures were taken. An example of this was on a recent vacation "Out West" we visited several National Parks. When you visit several parks it is hard to know which trail you were on let alone what park you were in. At the beginning and end of each trailhead I would snap the plaque stating where I was or what trail I just finished. This helps immensely when identifying and organizing photos when you are home.

How to organize your photos on your computer

A great photo organizer is to save your pictures to folders each time you download them to your computer. This saves you time in the long run. Even if you do not label the pictures, you should organize groups of pictures on your hard drive. Using "My Documents" is the easiest way to do this. I never download pictures unless I create a specific folder for those pictures. If my card is full, it may take 3 or 4 folders to organize the photos.

Sometimes a photo could go into 2 or 3 different categories. It is easier to make a copy of the photo and put one in each folder. This could happen if you are on a vacation and take a picture of Uncle Mike. You might have a folder for that vacation and one for relatives.

There is no set logic on how to organize the folders - use what makes the most sense to you and take into account how you may be using the pictures in the future.

Here are some ways to organize your photos:

Date
I find a general year archive a good idea. In that year I will include a wide variety of folders, but I have found that I tend to remember which year a picture was taken. This yearly archive will also include several special occasion folders. Sometimes you have a few pictures that really don't fit into your other categories, so you can just put them in the yearly archive. You can also decide if you want to use monthly or quarterly photos.

Projects
If you have several projects in mind then you can organize by those projects ... Family History project, Travel Retrospective, School Daze. You can organize by these projects as you get pictures.

Special Event
Special events are milestone events that take on a life by themselves. A wedding or the birth of a baby are obvious ones, but any event that is something you might want to commemorate with a photo project could use its own folder.

Personal Quirks
If it makes sense to you, go for it!

Organize with Photo Organizing Software

Photo organizing software will allow you to put tags onto your photos and find photos later by these tags or keywords. The photo organizing software creates a database that allows you to sort your pictures in a number of ways.

Go here if you are interested in learning more about photo organizing software or photo management software.

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