Tips For Organizing Your Photos

Today's Photo Tip – Organizing Your Photos: This subject is so important, I made it one of the permanent tabs at the top of the site when I created it. Because it is a process that I often ‘tweak’ to make improvements, today I decided to emphasize its importance by adding it to my Photo Tips category.  Though I know there are probably several programs out there that help organize photos, I prefer using a manual method that I created some time ago. The basic steps below provide a summary of the process I use that is outlined in the “Saving Pics” tab. After reviewing this post, click the tab at the top for more detail.

Step 1. - Transferring Negatives To The Computer: The first step is to get your negatives off the camera and onto your computer. Select a hard drive with the necessary storage and create a single folder into which you download all of the photos from your camera.

Step 2. – Properly Catalog Your Negatives: Create negative folders with a “Neg-“ prefix in the title, followed by the dates of the photos and a brief description of the topics.

Step 3. – Develop a Personal System For Filing and Naming Your Edited Photos: I create subject folders for the permanent placement of all my edited photos: This can be as simple or as detailed as is needed in order to help you locate your pictures in the future. Starting out you may only need a few folders, however, as time goes on and you continue to take more and more pictures, it will be relatively easy to add additional subject folders, and sub-folders, as needed. Use a naming convention that makes sense to you having regard to how you expect to search for your photos later on. Once you have created the necessary subject folder(s) in which to store your pictures, select and open the appropriate folder and or sub-folder, copy and  paste the newly created negative folder. After pasting the negative folder, rename it by removing the [Neg-] prefix. Once you have the negatives copied to an appropriate subject folder, you can begin the process of editing them. Refer to my tab titled “Editing Pics” for more information on this all important process.

Step 4. - Preparing Picture Files for Permanent Storage: After completion of the editing process (see Editing Pics), you will be left with a corresponding photo with its original camera title for each edited picture. As all of these files are still in the original “negatives” folder, you can now delete these unedited photos. This will vastly reduce the amount of storage space used on your computer. Next, close the folder and rename it by inserting an [-E] after the date in the folder name, indicating that it has been reviewed edited.

Step 5. - Review for Placement Into More Specific Subject Folders: Because the final subject folder may have a generic name, often indicating the place or location where the pictures were taken, I then review each of the edited pictures to determine if any of them need to be copied to a more specific subject folder, e.g. if while taking pictures at Cold Creek Nevada, you also took pictures of some cacti; then copy just these pictures to a subject folder that contains just pictures of cacti.

Step 6. – Finally, Perform A Backup:  If you have a manual backup process that involves saving files to either an external drive or to a separate drive in your computer, you should now copy these two folders to the appropriate backup location. If you don't currently have a backup plan, then you need to establish one NOW. Never assume that your photos will always be safe.There will come a day when either your computer or one of its drives will fail and without backups of your photos, everything may be lost FOREVER. I’ve had it happen and recently a close friend of mine just lost everything because he didn’t have a backup. I currently have two plans in use. First, I back up all my photos on my computer’s internal hard drive to an external hard drive. Secondly, I use Carbonite, an Internet Cloud storage solution that takes the worry out of backing up by securely and automatically backing up all of my selected files to a state-of-the-art data center on highly reliable disk arrays. Once you install Carbonite, you'll never have to remember to back up again. The automatic backup runs continually in the background, backing up new and changed files whenever your computer is connected to the internet. Click here to learn more ... Making Photo Backups.