Organizing your pictures is like construction in many respects. How does one build a wall? Brick by brick! Simple right? However, without a carefully laid out plan all those bricks on top of each other make no sense. You need to build multiple walls that will make up the rooms and restrooms and the kitchen. Without a larger plan, all those bricks laid on top of each other will make very little practical sense. This illustration applies to organizing your pictures as well. Each of your pictures is one brick and each folder one wall. But how do the walls come together to form a room? What is the larger plan?

Once you learned how to name your folders consistently and efficiently you will have very many folders…nicely sorted and named, but very many. So, you need some grouping of these folders. You can think of categories of pictures like: church pictures, work pictures, family pictures, kids pictures. These are broad categories that would include a large number of your picture folders.

How efficient are your digital pictures folders?

So you create a folder for each category. I use capital letters for these folders…something like this: CHURCH, WORK, FAMILY. All of these folders are at the same level. So your folder structure would look something like:

My Pictures
  CHURCH
  FAMILY
  WORK

Then, the next step would be to move all your pictures folders into these categories. You would still have quite a few folders for each category but not as many as in the beginning. Now, let’s go one level deeper. I have found that most people use date as their criterion for grouping their pictures, so the most natural way is to create a folder for each year. What does this mean? Take one category that you created and you place all your folders taken in 2007 in a folder called 2007. Then all the pictures taken in 2006 in a folder called 2006. And you continue until all your folders belong to a “year” folder. So, your folder structure would look something like the box below.

My Pictures
  CHURCH
    2007
    2006
  FAMILY
    2007
    2006
    2005
  WORK
    2007
    2006

You can easily see that you can keep building on this foundation. This is a strong foundation!

Tagged as: Folders