Organizing Your Digital Photos

I thought of a couple of different titles for this post before landing on something that people wouldn't immediately read and think "What is wrong with this person?! She can't even form a coherent thought and she is writing a blog?!". Titles such as "How to keep from going crazy in the midst of digital chaos" or "One way to prove to yourself that you take too many photos" or "Showing your husband that it pays to take your camera everywhere". None of them really hit the mark though so I decided to go the boring obvious route.

No matter the title, the reasoning behind this post is simple. It may seem strange to those who know me personally since I am anything but organized in general, but when it comes to digital files I am ridiculously rigid in my photo storage. There is an obvious need for this since I take so many pictures of everything. I mean, if you asked Craig he would say that I spend too much time shooting but I like to think of it as preserving moments in time for all of us. You see, I like to create yearly photo books for our family - a way to visually summarize the past 365 days of our lives. For this reason, I try to be as organized as I possibly can with each and every photo that I take. Over the years, I have honed it to, what seems to be, the most efficient way storage system and I thought I would teach you all the ways of the Jedi. Just call me Yoda. my way of doing things. So here goes...

Once I take a picture, I connect the memory card to my computer and copy the pictures onto my external hard drive. I have a master folder called PHOTOS which I then break down into years.

Each year is broken down into months.

And each month is broken down by activity and date.

Each activity has its own system as well. I take photos in RAW {or CR2} format and I like to keep them, in the event I need the original file for any reason. Once I edit the photos, I keep those in a separate, easy to access file.

 I also keep a Family Yearbook folder in each year's folder so that I can pull my favorite photos as I go through the year, breaking those photos into monthly folders as well. Full disclosure : I just started that this weekend, so technically it hasn't been put to use yet, but I foresee it being a huge time saver.

Overall, this system makes it so much easier to keep track of the thousands of photos that are stored on my external hard drive. It is such an easy track to follow that it seems a crime to keep it to myself.

So...you're welcome.

Back to my non-nerdy regular, disorganized self tomorrow.