What is the solution for organizing your pictures?

Categories: Organize Pictures

This article is part of the tutorial called: Understand the Issues.
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The fundamental problem with organizing digital pictures is quantity…there are simply too many pictures we have to organize (see my previous article). Unless you use an efficient and consistent method for naming your folders you will very soon be overwhelmed by the large quantity of pictures you are taking. This article shows a summary of the method I use for organizing my pictures.

Why do we love taking pictures ?

People love taking pictures, and people love looking at pictures! We all love images better than words. Our lives are filled with events, some more important than others. From getting up in the morning, going to work, getting a hair cut to traveling, getting married and giving birth, the events in our lives vary in their impact to our lives. Those events that are most important to our lives become the subject of our pictures. Pictures help us remember these important events, they help us re-live feelings and sense the people and places that we see in pictures.

Two complementary methods for organizing your pictures.

With the advent of digital photography, we can take thousands upon thousands of pictures. While this is all great, this large quantity of pictures creates the organization problem that we’re all trying to solve. Over the years folder based methods of photo organization have proved to be the simplest for most digital camera users who organize their pictures around events. However, the advances in software and image metadata standards have allowed digital photographers to organize their growing collections based on descriptive and efficient keywords. So, now you’re no longer limited to organizing your pictures based on events but you can organize them according to…well pretty much anything you want. Let’s analyze these two solutions to picture organization.

How do you remember an event ?

Now, let’s think about this from a different perspective. What helps you remember an event? Some of the times an approximate date can be enough, while most of the times you need a date AND a description of the event. If you have these two pieces of information, then you can search in your memory and bring up that event in front of your mind’s eye.

1. An event driven folder based method for organizing your pictures.

A simple folder based method for picture organization.

I have used this simple observation to create the simplest and most efficient folder based method for organizing my pictures…of course it’s the most efficient and the best and the prettiest too My method is based on the clues I need to remember events in my life: dates and descriptions. I use both of these in creating precise names for picture folders. This way I can easily organize my pictures in a structure that easily extends in order to accommodate more and more pictures as more events happen in my life.

The key to my method is the way I name the folders. While most people use a combination of dates and descriptions of events, they don’t do it consistently. Also, most people do not know how to take advantage of how their computer sorts files and folders. My method combines the precise folder naming and an understanding of computer file storage, resulting in simplicity and efficiency…how about that for a marketing slogan?

Solution

Features of a simple and efficient method for picture organization:

Consistent rules for folder names: Date-Description.[Read more about creating efficient folder names]
Folder names contain date and description of each event (i.e. 06_08-Yosemite_Park_hiking_friends)
The naming convention uses the inherent sorting mechanism available in the operating system. All folders will be sorted by event date. [Read more details about taking advantage of the inherent sorting mechanism]
Folder names include a specific date for their contents.
Folder names contain a concise event description that includes specific keywords.

2. Organize your pictures using efficient keywords.

A simple example where keywords would be helpful.

Let’s say you visit Paris and you take tons of pictures (you should do that for sure if you visit Paris). Then you come home and you create multiple folders with the date and Paris as the place. Something like:

08_03_25-Paris
08_03_26-Paris
08_03_27-Paris

This is all cool. But then you realize you have too many pictures and you want to show your friends all the Eiffel Tower pictures. You realize then that you have those pictures in all your three folders. You have only one solution: You can create another folder called Eiffel_Tower and copy all the Eiffel Tower pictures into this folder. This will work but you just created two copies of the same picture in two separate folders. Depending on how many times you have to do that you can fill up a hard drive very quickly.

Why are keywords so cool ?

So, wouldn’t it be extremely cool if you wouldn’t have to copy the pictures into a new folder? If you could just add some keywords to your pictures it would be great. You could add Paris to all your pictures from Paris, but the ones that have the Eiffel Tower in them you can just label as Paris, Eiffel Tower. All would be complete if you could not search by Eiffel Tower and voila!…your Eiffel Tower pictures would come up without you having to create a special folder. Yes, you know where I’m going…folders would not work for this! You need a special kind of software to enable you to do this: tagging of images, but if you can afford buying this kind of software, you can add a lot of power to your image collection.

So, what is the solution to organizing digital pictures ?

This article is part of the tutorial called: Understand the Issues.
< Previous Lesson || Next Lesson> Well, it’s a two step solution. For most people, the first step is sufficient, while for the more advanced and professional photographers, the second step is a must. I always tell people to start with a carefully constructed folder structure and then see if they need to worry about adding keywords to their pictures. If folders are not enough then adding keywords would give them the flexibility they want.

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Article published on: Aug 02 , 2006 under Organize Pictures

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Share your own experience

Have you discovered a better way of doing things? Have you tried something and it didn't work? Whether good or bad, I am always interested in reading about other people's experiences with managing their pictures. So, feel free to leave a comment or a link below and share your own experience.