Stock photo by Miguel Ugalde
Digital cameras are everywhere. It’s a beautiful thing. More and more of life’s little nuances are being captured for prosperity. That cute dog wearing a sweater on the street? Snapped a photo of it. The mouth-watering slice of chocolate cake you had for lunch? Got it. You looking fantastic in that to-die-for-outfit? You’ve captured it in multiple angles and backgrounds. You see where I’m going with this, right? After a year, you have an abundance of photos. In my case, I have 4,498 photos. I don’t expect everyone to have amassed a hoard of that size. (My photo habits border on that of the paparazzi.) No matter the size of your library, it helps to keep it organized. I have some tips on how to tame your photo library.
Clean-up your Photo Library
Delete any blurry or poorly exposed photos.
This sounds like common sense. However after browsing through some photo libraries, I realize that there are a lot of blurry photos being saved for no apparent reason. Unless you’re a master at Photoshop or going for the out-of-focus, artistic look, you do not need to hold onto bad shots.
Delete any extra shots.
At any given event or occasion, it is likely you took multiple shots of the same subject. For example, you have 4 shots of your friend’s new kitten. Chances are that only 1 of the 4 shots is worth keeping or showing to the general public. What does it hurt to keep the other 3? Multiply those 3 shots by a hundred (or a thousand) and you have valuable hard drive space that is being wasted.
Delete any shots that you wouldn’t otherwise have printed.
This may sound a bit extreme . However, why hold onto photos that you wouldn’t spend the money to have printed? You don’t actually have to get them all printed. Just sort with that criteria in mind.
Hopefully, these steps will decrease your photo library by a good percentage. In my case, I’m shooting for 50%. All this will work will make the next step of organizing much easier. I’ll get to that in my next post. For now, I’ll be sorting through my thousands of photos.
If you have any additional sorting tips, please feel free to share. I could use all the help I can get.
Twitter: @coreyann
My biggest advice is to 1 – do not store your pictures (if you are on PC) in your “My Documents” folder. It slows the computer down as Windows isn’t designed to run well with a lot of memory taken up in that folder. Move it to a C: folder. 2 – Organize your pictures by year then month then date or event. For example, I have a 2008 folder, then all of the months and in the months each date that I took pics I have 122508 etc. If you want to remember what you shot that date just title the folder 122508 – Christmas. Puts it in chronological order which really helps when trying to print for albums and when trying to find a shot!!
Hi! A few digital photo organization tips…
I organize my digital photos based on year and event (ex. 2009 > New Year Celebration; Valentine’s; Jenn’s 1st Birthday).
To save space on your computer/laptops, I recommend saving all your photos on an external hard drive (i heart western digital passport external hard drives. they’re small and portable!).
For PC computers: You can also rename your photos from the generic file names by selecting all the photos in the folder, right click , rename the photo files to the appropriate event name. This makes searching for photos really easy.
For Macs: use the iPhoto software to tag keywords and the name of the person(s) in your photo. This will allow you to sort through your photos with ease (ex. if you want to create a slideshow or print photos of your daughter Melissa, type “Melissa” in the search bar at the bottom of the iPhoto window. iPhoto will show all the pictures tagged Melissa.