If you have been taking digital pictures for a while you’ve probably been forced to deal with organizing your pictures. You have also probably been asking yourself if the method you’re using is a good method. Currently there are two different approaches to picture organization: using tags and using folders. There are a number of software programs that support either or both methods. Which method should you choose? This article will analyze the tag and folder based methods for picture organization.
Folder method description.
What do I mean by folders? I mean simple folders that you create on your computer hard drive. These folders contain groupings of files that you think share something in common. For example: a folder called My Pictures contains all your pictures taken during family trips, with your kids and at various events. In order to further organize your pictures you may choose to create sub-folders within the My Pictures folder. You may create sub-folders like trips and kids and split your pictures accordingly. The whole purpose of creating folders and sub-folders is to divide the quantity of files present on your hard drive. This is a classic application of the divide and conquer principle. One can manage complexity by dividing the quantity of objects into smaller and contained portions. Now, this is pretty simple stuff, and if you know how to use the Internet you should be very familiar with creating folders and sub-folders.
However, even though this is very basic, there is a common problem that most people face. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about the names of their folders. Pretty much what comes to mind first, that’s the name of the folder. While this may work for a short while, in the long run it doesn’t solve the clutter problem. Actually, it may make it worse because we can create multiple folders with similar names and then forget we created them and create a new one.
Therefore, organizing your pictures using folders requires a little thinking and most of all it requires consistency. The thinking behind this method has to do with finding a naming convention for your folders and then sticking to it. This convention has to have a few particulars about it. Below I’m listing some of the characteristics of my folder naming convention:
Folder naming convention example
- Example: 07_11-Malibu_Adamson_House_visit
- Naming convention: [Date]-[Place]_[event description]
- Folder name includes a date for its content (07_11 = November 2007)
- Folder name contain the place of the event.(Malibu)
- Folder name contains a brief description of the event (3 short words max). (Visit to the Adamson House museum)
What this folder naming convention accomplishes is very simple: you’re actually embedding “tags” into the folder names rather than into the pictures themselves.
Next Page: Side by size comparison of the two methods
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