How to Organise Your Digital Photos

I was helping out a friend a few days ago and showed her how I organised my digital photos. It's a method that has lots of advantages and after 5 years I can find pretty much any photo I took from anywhere quickly.

Archival

I archive all my photos - I keep a copy of everything I take.

Why? - viewing on the camera isn't the best way of deciding which are the best shots.

How? - I have a portable hard-drive - now at 160GB - it holds all the photos I've taken (just).

I create folders for each year.




Inside each folder I date and locate many sub folders - corresponding usually to a days shoot. I use the format "date - location" - "yyyymmdd-country-location" - eg. "20070704-Malaysia-Perhentians" - by listing details and sorting by name I can very quickly find photos from whenever and wherever I have been. You can generally remember roughly when you were at a particular location.




Then inside each of these - I store the photos - raw, thumbnails, videos - whatever comes out of my camera.





Getting Photos Ready for My Blog - generally my best photos

I generally work on my photos before submitting to my blog - usually just a quick crop and for underwater shots a little enhancing of some of the colours (just a little!) - crop and shop.

I have a directory on a different drive - windows by default moves files when dragging and dropping on the same drive - but copies when using a different drive. Doing this means I'm less likely to accidentally edit an archive photo. I have a directory called "best photos", inside this I have folders for the years; and sub-folders for each location.




These folders contain a sub-folder for the original sized images - worked on - and have preview size images fitting an area of 800x800 pixels - ready for uploading to my blog.




This works for me - it's easy - quick - keeps my photos archived. I still make backup DVD's of my archive and send copies back to my parents for safe keeping - I haven't lost a photo since 2002 with this method.

There are many other methods of organising your photos - how do you organise yours?

There are many software packages to help - Iphoto on the Mac, Picassa on the PC - but I always worry about losing quality, being reliant on third party software - with this method it will work on any computer PC, Mac, Linux - and doesn't tie me in with any software. Reply to this

I think the most important thing is to have a system and stick with it 😊 - thanks for the details of yours Capsfan2002

Something else to consider - remember - if you archive your photos on formats like CD* - to upgrade them when newer technology comes along. Anyone remember 5.25 inch floppies? anyone have a drive that would read them now? - (not a useful example for photos as one floppy would not hold one photo from an average digital camera these days) - but it makes the point. Upgrade your digital archives if you don't want to lose them.

*Some of these formats will deteriorate with age so it's doubly important! Reply to this