By now, you’ve sorted all of your award-winning photos and tossed those photos that fall short of spectacular.  This should leave you with a fairly manageable image library. In my world, a manageable image library contains 3,002 images. (I fell short of my goal of reducing my library by 50%.) Now we’ve come to the heavy lifting. Time to organize and back-up your image library.  Here are my tips for both.

Organize Your Image Library

If you are a Mac user like myself, you are in luck.  We are fortunate to have received a highly useful program called iPhoto with our computers. iPhoto allows to organize and manage your photos (among other things).  If you are a Mac user, your photos are already organized courtesy of iPhoto.

EAD Reader, Tiffany, offers this additional advice for Mac users. Tag keywords and the name of the person(s) in your photo. Some examples of keywords are “vacation”, “birthday”, “outdoors”, etc. This will allow you to sort through your photos with ease.

If you are a PC user like a large percentage of the population, your image library may require some serious organizing.  By default, Windows imports your digital photos into your My Photos folder and does little else with it. No need to despair. First, you need to decide if you want to manage your images using software similar to iPhoto or if you want to manually manage your images.  I prefer software because they offer gallery viewing of  your images. There are several free programs available.

One of which is Picasa. Picasa is a program that has been available for several years for both Mac and PC users.  It can be downloaded for free from this site. A bonus to using Picasa is that it allows you to publish to Picasa web albums, which come with any gmail email account.

Another free program availble to PC users is Photo Gallery.  Depending on what version of Windows you’re running, you may already have it on your system.  It can be downloaded for free from this site.

After installing either program, you are given the option to import existing photos. By selecting that option, either program will sort your photos by date and event. From there, you may tag your images as well.

If installing software is not for you, you can manage your photos manually by creating folders on your computer. EAD reader, Corey, has these tips to share:

Do not store your pictures 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.

Organize your pictures by year then month then date or event. For example,  have a 2009 folder.  Then, create subfolders of the months in the year. In each month folder, create a subfolder for each date that you have photos. If you want to remember what you shot that date just title the folder 012509 – Birthday. This puts everything in chronological order which really helps when trying to print for albums and when trying to find a shot

Backup Your Image Library

This is the final and most important part of organizing your photos. I have heard many horror stories about how laptops have been stolen or computers have crashed.  What good is all this sorting and organizing if all your images are lost with your computer? Here are some different methods of image backup.

Photo Sharing Websites – Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Photobucket, Shutterfly

Aside from allowing us to share our images with friends and family, many photo sharing websites are great resources for storing your photos. The amount of image storage available to you varies from site to site.  Some sites offer a limited amount for free.  Other sites give you unlimited storage with paid membership. Please read the FAQ section of each individual provider to find the one that best suites your needs. If you want to store your images online and not allow everyone access, simply upload your images to private albums or galleries.  This will keep your images away from spying eyes.

Burn Images to disk.

Depending on your computer, you can burn images to CD or DVD.  You can group images to burn to disk by month or event.  After burning the images to disk, clearly label each and store in CD sleeve or case. Labeling is key to preventing headaches in the future.  I learned this the hard way.

Use an External Drive

External drives are readily available in many different storage capacities. I prefer Western Digital or Seagate brand drives.  External drives free up much needed memory on your computer. This allows your computer to run faster. External drives also allow other computer users to readily access your images.

No one method is better than the other when it comes to protecting your images. If you really want to be safe, use all three methods of backup.  It never hurts to have your image library in more than one location.

If you do all this, pat yourself on the back.  This is one thing you can take of your Organizational To-Do list.     Meanwhile, I’ll be hard at working burning images to disk and uploading.