I have been always writing about backing up your pictures as part of your picture organization strategy. You have to do it, period. That being said, how do you set up an automatic backing up procedure that will save you lots of headache? In addition, what if you have to upgrade your storage for more space and keep backing up everything? There are some simple things that can be done in order to simplify your backup strategy.
When reading professional photographers blogs and websites I keep coming across this question: is it a good idea to rename your digital pictures files or leave them with the original file name assigned by the camera automatically? The question seems to be a subtle one and the apparent reason for the debate is not immediately obvious. In this article I will be focusing on clearing the issues and identifying the terms.
Selecting the best pictures from a set of digital pictures is one of the most common tasks for a digital photographer. This used to be the case even during the film era. Sometimes you would just print one copy of each picture in a roll of film and then you would physically select the best pictures to put in your photo album. The rest would end up in some envelope in a shoebox that would start collecting dust. Well, this happens in the digital world as well, except for…the dust. But how do you select your best pictures efficiently in a digital world?
As you know, I keep looking for simple solutions for organizing my digital pictures. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Andrea D’Intino about his company’s product called Tabbles. Tabbles provides an innovative approach to organizing all the files on your computer, not only your pictures. I’m hoping to be able to provide a full review of this product, but for now you can read my interview with Andrea where he describes his own company’s product.
Even though I take a ton of pictures I also shoot quite a few video clips as well. Having small children makes taking video clips a lot of fun since they like to look at video clips as well. Learning better ways to organize my video clips is one of my goals for this year. Over the years I created a very efficient method for organizing my pictures, but when it comes to my video clips, I pretty much place them in the same folders where my pictures are. This is the simplest way, but it might not be best way to organize my video clips. In this article I’m exploring different options for organizing your video clips. I’m not sure what is the best method but here are some options I found to work pretty well.
I was planning to write a book for a long time but it was not easy to put everything together and edit the content so that it is clear and easy to follow. Well, after many weeks of work, I was able to put it together in a beautiful PDF document that has bookmarks for easy navigation. Now, you’re the judge if it’s clear and easy to follow.
Why is organizing digital pictures so challenging and confusing ? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the way I’m organizing my pictures? Well, these might be some of the questions you may be asking yourself. This page is a shortcut to an important series of articles I have written. This series deals with explaining the fundamental issues that all digital photographers face when they try to organize their pictures. Well, read these articles to find out…and let me know what you think.
Digital pictures organization should always start with creating an efficient folder structure. This way you start to clean up your computer and prepare the way for creating a backup plan for your pictures as well. Only after naming your folders properly you will see how easy it is to add new pictures to your computer without being overwhelmed.
When learning something new the first steps are always the hardest and the most important. In order to accomplish something, you have to start somewhere. This is also the case when it comes to learning how to organize your pictures. I can talk a lot about efficient folder structures, image metadata, IPTC, XMP and other things like this. But many times I people simply ask me: how do I start organizing my pictures? I think that’s a great question.
Last month I have created a survey among the readers of OrganizePictures.com. The question was very simple: Do you use folders or tags? The answers were pretty much split in the middle. Half of those who answered responded that they use only folders for organizing their pictures, while half of them were using a combination of folders and tags for organizing their pictures. Only two people said they’re only using tags for organizing their pictures. One of the conclusions of this survey is that image organization just with folders is very popular. I was not surprised by this conclusion because of several reasons.
It is rare when a complex problem can have a simple solution. Most of the times however, a complex problem can have a simple solution that only works well for some of the times. When “some of the times” is “most of the times” for you, then the simple solution will work fine. However if “some of the times” does turn out not to be “most of the times” then the simple solution breaks down very easily. This is the case with the folder based method of organizing your pictures. So, how do you know when folders are not enough?
