Build an efficient structure for your digital pictures

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!

Essentials for organizing your digital photos

Here are the essential products and services I have come to rely on for many years to keep my media collection organized and safe. Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Excellent Lightroom and Picasa alternative. If you need a cheaper and simpler photo manager then ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac (save 30% until May 24th) or ACDSee Pro for Windows (save $30 until May 24th) is my preferred solution for organizing all my media. It has a very fast browser, great image editing and it's simple to use.

If you do a lot of image editing like I do, I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC via the annual Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom has best photo editing capabilities even though it comes with a steeper learning curve. If you do image editing, Adobe Lightroom is my favorite.

I recommend Backblaze Cloud Backup for affordable & reliable unlimited cloud backup. I have been using Backblaze for backing up all pictures & videos for more than 5 years now. All my invaluable digital memories are safe and secure. This is the best solution especially if you have a large quantity of media files.

Use a reliable & affordable external hard drive for backing up everything on your computer. It is absolutely essential for keeping all your memories backed up and safe.

Start organizing now using detailed, step-by-step instructions and videos:
Personal Coaching (closed) Independent Course Private Lessons
Reference book Basics book Picasa book

YOURS FREE! 10 crucial steps most people miss when organizing their digital photos

Most people want to just organize their digital pictures and ignore these crucial steps right at the beginning...when they are shooting and transferring their digital pictures. Then they wonder why they can't organize their digital photos! Avoid most people's mistakes and start on the right track!

Subscribe

You can unsubscribe anytime. Please review our Privacy Policy.

Thank you!

You have successfully joined our subscriber list.