anablepo{blog}
storytelling though communications, design, & family

Photos are a huge blessing and curse. We have moved from a age of stacks of photos stuff in shoe boxes, to an age of photos scattered around our computer’s hard drive. I have done several slide shows and the main pain always comes down to 1) When was the photo taken? 2) Who is in the photo? 3) Where was the photo taken?

Some tips from my experience to help in organizing digital photos and scanned photos so that you don’t have multiple DSC0120, IMG5612, etc…

{STEPS}

1. Create a NEW folder called YEAR. (i.e. “2009″)
2. Create a NEW folder called TEMP within YEAR (i.e. “2009″ > “TEMP”
3. Whenever you bring pictures off your camera, load them into your TEMP folder!
4. Go through and delete bad, close to duplicates, etc…
5. Using a program like Adobe Bridge, Google’s Picassa. Do a batch rename of all you files to the date created as YEARMONTHDATE (i.e. 20090609_001.jpg, 20090609_002.jpg or 20090609_robert heather in backyard.jpg, 20090609_grace abraham in the pool.jpg
6. Tag each of your photos with keywords (i.e. name, place, etc…) Keywords can be whatever you want. The key is to use words that will help you in being able to do a search for photos later using the keywords assigned to each of the photos.
7. Edit the photos as needed (i.e. crop, lighten, darken, etc…)
8. Now you can move these photos to the “YEAR” folder or subfolder (i.e. “2009 > “01-03_Jan_Mar”, “2009 > “04-06_Apr_Jun”, or however you want to name you subfolders.)

The overall key is to first place the photos in a general TEMP folder so that you know these photos have not been looked through. They need to be renamed, tagged with keywords, edited, etc… Once they are in the overarching YEAR folder, you know that these are the photos you wanted to keep and importantly to find quickly and view the photos you were looking for.

Please comment if you have questions or other digital photo organization tips to share.