Tags vs. Folders (1) - Tag your pictures!

Categories: Organize Pictures

Card Catalog
If you have been taking digital pictures for a while you’ve probably been forced to deal with organizing the pictures you’re taking. Personally, I have been using digital cameras for close to 5 years now and I have a collection of close to 30,000 pictures and videos…yes thirty thousand! That’s close to 50 Gb of hard disk space. I don’t really care how my numbers compare with yours…it’s of no consequence! I’m only trying to show that sooner or later anyone using a digital camera will be forced to organize their pictures in a consistent manner. I hope this is clear!

Introduction

Secondly, if we have agreed for the need for organization, the next question is how to do it. What method or methods are available? And then, what is the best method? These are only some of the questions that come to mind once the need for organization is settled. In this series of articles I will be presenting the two most popular methods available today…and their pros and cons.

The candidate methods under scrutiny are picture organization using tags and picture organization using folders. These are two different approaches to picture organization. There are a number of software programs that support either or both methods. So, let me start by explaining both methods one at a time. Today I will be presenting the tag method.

Organize your pictures using tags.

This method involves assigning one or more tags (descriptive words) to each digital picture on the hard drive. For example: let’s say that I take some pictures of my grandma’s birthday this year in 2007. Let’s also say that I’m taking 100 pictures. I download them to my computer into some folder (the name of the folder is irrelevant) and bring up my organization software (you always need one if you’re using tags). The software imports the folder and I see all my pictures that I have just taken. Then I assign some tags to all of them…this is called bulk tagging (this feature is a must for any tagging software). So, I assign the following tags: birthday, grandma and 2007.

Next, let’s say that I’m taking some pictures of my daughter Cristina at her own birthday in 2007. So, I go through the same process and I assign the following tags: birthday, Cristina and 2007. Now, the key is that the tags represent categories, your own categories. So, if you want pictures to fall within the same category then you have to use the same tag. In this case a tag called birthday is different than a tag called birthdays. Software usually allows you to manage your tags and will help you to choose the right tags.

The main purpose for creating and assigning tags is that you would be able to easily find your pictures. So, let’s say you’re looking for birthdays in 2007. Then you would open up your organization software and do a search on “birthday” and “2007″. This will filter out all the other pictures and will show you only the birthdays in 2007…assuming you have tagged them correctly. If I want to see all of my daughter’s pictures I would search for: Cristina. This would only show pictures that contain the tag Cristina.

The key advantage here is that one picture can belong to many categories. I can assign as many tags as I want to a picture. So every time I’m searching for one of the tags assigned to a particular picture, that picture would show up in my search. In my next article I will examine the folder method.

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