Organization: Picture Files
January 4, 2011
I love to take pictures, LOTS of pictures. In the first year of my daughter’s life, I took nearly 3,000 photos. No, I am not kidding. She was so new and so cute. 🙂
Even before the little girl arrived, photography was a hobby of mine. Most of the memory on any given computer at my house is taken up by photos. Again, lots and lots of photos.
I have always had a hard time organizing photo files. I’ve tried by subject, by event, by season, by age, ect. and they are always just a mess. I have pictures from multiple sources (i.e. My pics, friends pics, Grandma’s pics, professional pics) so they are never named the same way. I couldn’t find what I was looking for quickly or easily. Until last year.
I now organize my photos by year and by month. I start at the beginning of the year and get all my folders set up. I name each file by putting the # of the month followed by the month name. It looks like this.
The reason I use the number is for sorting purposes. This way, when I choose to have my computer arrange them by name, it puts them in chronological order. Now, whenever I move pics from my camera’s memory card, I just place them into the appropriate month.
If we have a really active month or there is a big event I may create a subfolder within the month. For example, this past November we went to Disney. I wanted to make sure those photos had their own little spot so I made a subfolder under 2010>11-November>Disney.
This has made it so much easier to find a particular picture or even groups of pictures! I love it when I find something that works well.
So, that’s my little tip for organizing picture files.
How do you organize yours?
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One Comment
Michelle Wilson
I organize mine by season and/or major event. "Uganda" had its own folder of course, but most of our other folders are "Summer 2010" or "Winter 10-11" or the like.