I was talking to Ranee the other day about organizing digital pictures. I always give her a hard time when she doesn’t get her images off the memory card right away. I thought maybe I would write about how I organize my photos. Though it’s not a perfect system, I can usually find what I’m looking for. Right now in my Pictures folder I have 109 gigs which boils down to 510 folders and 28,073 files. So that’s a lot…and that doesn’t include any of my client’s pictures.
When I take pictures I have my transfer program automatically delete the images off the card. This way I don’t end up deleting something I haven’t transferred or transfer images multiple times. All images are named by the date they were taken. If I took a picture today it would be name 022311_XX. (This also comes in handy because the printer I use prints the picture name on the back of every picture so I always have the date on the picture.) They are downloaded to a sorting folder that I keep only for pictures that need to be processed or sorted. (Right now in my sorting folder I have a couple pictures of Jasper and Ranee’s daughter’s basketball game.)
Now here’s where things would be slightly different for me. I shoot in a format called RAW. All images I take have to be processed in Photoshop and save to a jpg. If I take twenty pictures of Jasper I open them all in Photoshop and delete any out of focus, duplicates and process the rest. (By process I mean adjust exposure or other really basic editing effects.) If I had shot in regular JPG format I would sort through those twenty pictures in my folder and do the deleting right then. If you use any picture editing software now would be a good time to use it. Adjust colors, exposure, contrast… I really try to keep my post-processing to a minimum. I don’t want to look back at all my pictures in a year and think, “Why did I process all of those pictures that way?”. So I try to make them look the best in a simple, technical way. Usually I’m done there, although now is a great time to do a little black and white changing or other effects. If I change a picture to black and white I ALWAYS save the original.
Now comes the sorting process. For the most part I sort things by subject. I have twenty-eight main folders in my Pictures folder. Jasper, Josh & Kimberly, Nature, Christmas, Our House… I try to keep these folders pretty broad and then sort within. The Jasper folder is sorted by year and in each year folder I have a month folder. I have recently started making additional copies of pictures that belong in different folders. If I take a picture of Josh and Jasper, I try to remember to put a copy in Josh’s folder too. Since all of my pictures are saved by the date I have an easy time locating in specific folders. If the folder is sorted by name or date, my pictures are always in order.
Eventually I would like to have all pictures tagged with useful tags so that I can search for something and get every picture that contains that. Imagine searching for “kitchen” and getting every picture you have with your kitchen in it. Some day…right now that’s a little daunting. Like I said, my system isn’t ideal but it works for me. You really just have to find what works for you and allows you to find your images. And ALWAYS have a backup system in place! (But that’s a whole other post for another day…)
I’m with you on the organizing – I also try to get some prints a few times a year because I like to have actual albums for people to look through :)
Yes I would like to comment on the fact that Kimberly yells at me all the time. See how mean she is to me? Ha!! I am doing better now. Every time I take the pictures off my card right away & organize them, I say, “Kimberly would be so proud of me.”