Best way to organize small children pictures

When our children are small we take lots and lots of pictures. I mean lots and lots and lots of pictures. The older our children get the less pictures we take of them. I think it all has to do with how cute they are…the smaller, the cuter and the more pictures we take of them. This large quantity of pictures can make organizing them pretty challenging. There is however, one simple trick that makes organizing children pictures much easier.

We take lots of pictures of our small children because it’s easy

In the days of film, one would use lots of rolls of film. This was a complicated process: buying rolls of film, taking pictures and then taking them to be developed. Because of this complex process, people would take a lot less pictures. In addition, bad pictures used to cost you money…with lots of pictures, it would cost you lots of money.

A digital camera simply removes all this complexity and allows us to take bad pictures without any direct cost.

As a result…we take lots of pictures of our children when they’re small.

Why is it difficult to organize pictures of children?

If you have been reading this site, you know that the best way to organize your pictures is to create efficient folder names and image tags (Read Organize your pictures in 5 easy steps). Because tags are somewhat free form, there is nothing special about tagging small children pictures, so just follow the same rules for creating tags for any other picture (Read Efficient keywording techniques).

However, things get difficult when it comes to creating folders for organizing your children’s pictures. Why?

On OrganizePictures.com I advocate that organizing your pictures around events is the best way to keep track of your many pictures and stay sane.

This is exactly where the difficulty lies with small children pictures. Most of the pictures we take when our children are small are not tied to any regular event. For small children the events happen mostly at home, or at a local park or in the store. In these cases we tend to have lots and lots of pictures just taken at home which makes it hard to organize in folders.

This creates lots of folders that look like:

My Pictures
  2011
    2011-03-12-home-funny-face --> home event folder
    2011-03-13-police-station-school-trip  --> actual event folder
    2011-03-14-home-silly-dresses --> home event folder
    2011-03-15-home-pretend-doctor --> home event folder

Now, you can easily imagine that looking for a regular event folder like 2011-03-13-police-station-school-trip, can become somewhat challenging simply because of all the event folders with pictures from home or the park.

One simple thing that helps a lot with organizing small children pictures

The solution is simple: create one more folder to group all the “home” events. This way you create one folder that contains all the folders with pictures taken at home or park or any other “regular” place.

So your folder structure can look like this:

My Pictures
  2011
    2011-03-HOME-PICTURES  --> container for all home events in March
      2011-03-12-home-funny-faces
      2011-03-14-home-silly-dresses
      2011-03-15-home-pretend-doctor
    2011-03-13-police-station-school-trip

Now you can easily see that this makes navigating through an entire year folder much easier. Whenever you are looking for a regular event, you skip all the “home” events very easily and help you find things much easier.

This is another illustration of the old “divide and conquer” principle.

Essentials for organizing your digital photos

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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!

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