How do you organise your digital photos? Or perhaps I should ask first IF you organise them at all?
January 2010 marks a decade of my owning a digital camera. This milestone naturally led to me thinking more seriously about my digital files and how I should organise and protect them better. In today’s post, I’m going to share how I currently organise my digital photo files. Tomorrow I’ll be discussing the issues of backup and protection.
Organisation Of Digital Photo Files
Obviously there are many ways to organise your digital photos and I’m not going to suggest to you there is one correct way. I find my system works well for me and if it works for you too that’s great. 
Software – Some might opt for software to handle photo organisation. Google’s Picasa is a free solution and many cameras and photo printers also provide their own brand of free photo handling software. I have a personal aversion for anything that tries to take over my computer Big Brother style. Picasa (and programs like it) hungrily searches your hard drive and drags anything remotely resembling an image into its lair. Some programs even move your files from where you’ve downloaded them, so you’re not in complete control of where they’re physically stored.
Manual Organisation – I confess to being a bit of a control freak. My preference is to do all the organisation myself and really it doesn’t take all that much more time and effort.
Catch-All Folder – I find it easiest to have a dedicated folder on my computer named “Camera Dump” into which I unload all my photos from my SD cards. If I run out of space whilst shooting, I can empty the contents of a card into this folder, put the card back into my camera and continue taking photos.
File Structure – My photo storage system is a second dedicated folder named “Family Pix” (obviously you could call it anything you like, but that’s what I went with). Within this parent folder I set up yearly folders and event sub-folders (refer image above).
Sorting – When the Camera Dump folder gets a little overcrowded, I periodically sift through individual photo files and group them by event and/or date. Grouped photos are transferred into newly created event folders.
Labelling – Each event folder is labelled with a prefix of the date the photos were taken converted to the format YYMMDD. Photos dated 20 September 2009 will end up in a folder with the prefix “090920″. A bit of text is added to the label to trigger my memory of what photos reside within. So a folder might then end up with the label “090920 Jills Birthday” (no that’s not my real birth date.)
The beauty of this system is your computer’s operating system (Windows XP in my case) can sort alphabetically based on folder name. Your folders automatically end up in chronological order.
Individual Files – Some people like to rename individual files to make them more meaningful. It’s good idea if that works for you. Personally I’m a fan of keeping the naming convention used by my camera. When I owned a Kodak this was something like “PIC0001.jpg”, “PIC0002.jpg” etc. Now that I own a Canon it’s “IMG_0001.jpg”, “IMG_0002.jpg”. The reasons I leave the filenames intact are:
- Volume – I take thousands of photos a year. It’s far too much work to rename them all. I’m lazy.
- Sorting – Your computer’s operating system can sort alphabetically based on filename, so your individual files are automatically in chronological order. If you change the filenames, the chronological order is messed up and you will have to sort them by another method.
- Sequence – You can determine if there’s a photo missing from a sequence by examining the numbers in the filenames. (Handy if you’re scrapping a sequence of action shots say.)
- Tracking – You can track how many photos in total you’ve taken with the camera. (Why? I’m funny like that. I just like to KNOW.
) - Did I mention renaming files involves too much work?
Identifying particular photos is not made any more difficult by leaving the filenames intact. You can simply turn on the thumbnails view when viewing the files in a specific folder. In Windows XP, it’s done like this (refer image below)…
So instead of a detailed view like this (below)…
You get a visual representation like this (below)…
Ah…much better!
So that’s how I go about organising my digital photos. So now I’m curious to know. How do you organise yours?
Don’t forget, in tomorrow’s post I’ll be looking at the issue of backups and protection.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I use a system similar to yours Jill, I find that works for me. I also have CM Memory Manager, but have never really set it up properly – then there is the good old Kodak program……everything goes in and stays in albums. I find I am happy with the folders as I can keep them sorted (or a least I think I can)
Interesting Joy. I’ve heard about the CM software but haven’t actually seen it in action. I have several bits of software on my pc but don’t use them…a Canon branded one, a HP branded one…and Picasa before I ditched it. Organising my folders is a much more straightforward approach for me personally.