I don’t know about you but I love taking pictures. With the invention of the digital camera, a whole new world was opened up! We have improved our lives in one way and complicated our lives in another. Remember the “good old days” when you took a few pictures , waited to fill up the roll; then sent it off to be processed and “hoped” the pictures came out. Not a great feeling with one-time events, like weddings, graduations and anniversaries. Now you can take the picture, view it and take a new one if someone closed their eyes, moved at the wrong time or had a silly look on their face.
I take pictures of everything; birds at our feeders, beautiful clouds, grandkids playing sports, vacations and family reunions. I’ve been known to take a thousand pictures a day when we are on vacation in a beautiful setting. To complicate matters, I take pictures on my main camera, my backup camera, my small purse camera and my phone.
But the real question is how do you organize them?
I struggled with that question in the beginning of my digital photo career. Initially, I simply copied the files from the camera to a folder with the beginning and ending date so I knew which dates I had downloaded. That didn’t work very well because I had to look through the pictures to figure out the event. I finally found a method that works pretty well. I store the pictures by Year; naming the top level folder 2018; then by Month, naming the second folder level 12 – December 2018 (so you end up with 01 – January on top and 12 – December at the bottom) and within that folder by event; such as Christmas. Here is a sample of my file structure:
Even this organization style has its problems!
One of the challenges is finding a photo when you can’t remember the year or don’t know the date. There are programs that help you organize and find photos. In a future blog I will talk more about that option.
Overall, I have complicated my life by having multiple medias where I store my pictures. First I take them off the camera onto my Surface computer. Then I have a portable hard drive where I back the photos up especially when we are traveling. When I get home, I want to put them on a server which is then backed up to a removable media. Years ago, I backed up my photos to CDs and shared them with our family. That’s not practical anymore.
Over the years, I have not organized the photos as well as I should have. Now I need to find a lot of time to improve the organization. In the meantime, I have been compiling information about those pictures by using OneNote to track memories by Year. In another blog post, I will talk about that method of storing a variety of information that is searchable.
Please take time to share your method of organizing your digital photos by leaving a comment.
Dedicated to: Our son, James E Watkins, III, 1980 – 2015: Guitarist, Musician, Web and Database Programmer; Intelligent, Creative, Silly, Loving, Strong, a Fighter (battled cancer for 5 years); Not Afraid to Speak His Mind. Known as the Angry Gnome and World’s Greatest Uncle. Never forgotten; forever 34.