Digital Photography Has Revolutionized the Way We Preserve Family Memories

Within a week of getting your first digital camera, you already know why it’s so awesome to have one. It takes a little longer to realize the bad that comes with the good. You have a hard drive full of photos and they’re all disorganized.

My method of organizing photos requires no special software and works on any operating system. What’s even more amazing is, my method is free and easy.

Admit it. You take more photos than you ever did when the only choice was film. After flexing some math muscles, I found that:

• I have taken over 25,000 photos since I first went digital in 2002.
• If those photos were taken with a film camera, it would have cost me over $13,000.

You end up with a ton of photos. Only a few are worth printing, and fewer are worth enlarging, but you keep them all anyway. It’s out of focus, underexposed, and unintentionally motion-blurred. But it’s a picture of your daughter smiling. How can you delete that? Hard drives are cheap, right? Photos accumulate. More megapixels only translates into bigger files, not necessarily better photos. You will eventually run out of space.

As an early adopter of digital photography, I had to stay organized since day one. Back then, memory cards cost about 120 times what they do today. I had to offload my photos after every outing. Even with today’s pixel-bloated cameras, you can go for weeks without downloading pictures to your computer. The advancement of technology makes us lazy.

How to Organize Your Digital Photos

I organize my photos by day. Each day’s photos gets a separate folder. Each folder is named like this:

• YYYY.MM.DD – description
• 2007.09.29 – funny cat pictures

I put the year first like that because of the way computers sort search results. You don’t have to. It just makes sense to me.

If I caught the cats wrestling in the afternoon and have a social gathering in the evening, I make 2 separate folders, even if those events are on the same day. It’s easier to remember “2007.09.29 – Eric and Debbie’s party” than “2007.09.29.” Eric and Debbie have a lot of parties, so the date needs to be there too.

Then I put all those folders in one big folder for each year. It’s not necessary to put all the folders from January 2008 into one big folder called “January 2008.” Alternately, you can just put all of your photos from each month into one appropriately named folder. A folder called “Photos – January 2008″ is still way more organized than most people are now.

Throughout this process, you’ll be looking at almost all of your photographs. You’ll see some that deserve deletion. There’s no need to keep photos resulting from poor decision-making (why did I take a picture of that?!) or those that are bad for technical reasons (exposure, focus, camera shake, etc). You might recover some significant space on your hard drive.

Free Tools To Help You

If you don’t feel like doing all of that, at least download the obviously crappy photos and download Picasa. Picasa is also a very capable photo editor – crop, straighten, fix exposure, and do much more! If you’re sick of viruses, spyware, and spotty performance, switch to a Mac and use iPhoto.

It’s still worth doing all of the above. I name each “film roll” in iPhoto according to my established filing and naming conventions. This facilitates making backups. I make backups once a month and immediately after special occasions.

I’ve never been happy with the software that cameras are bundled with, so resist the temptation. Use Picasa, iPhoto, or your own filing system instead.

What if I’m Totally Disorganized?

Sorting your photos may seem like a daunting task, but it’s well worth it. Worst-case scenario is, you’ll spend about 2-3 focused hours on it and be done. It doesn’t have to be done all in one sitting either.

If you feel you are totally disorganized, Picasa will search your entire hard drive for photos. Then your photos will be sorted by date, provided your EXIF data is correct (you did set the date/time on your camera when you bought it, right?). After your photos are sorted, you will be able to move them into logically named and organized folders.

Learn More About Digital Photography

• Back Up Your Digital Photos
• Strobist
• Shooting the Kids
• 5 Quick Tips for Better Child Photography
• Digital Photography School Blog
  

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