Ever since the era of digital cameras began, we started to mindlessly take hordes and hordes of photos without ever giving a thought to anything else. But somewhere down the line, we all realized that our organizing skills were showing rather poorly when it came to digging through our digital mess and finding that one captured memory. If you know what I am talking about and would like to discipline your photo-jungle act, I suggest you read on and find a few tips on how to organize photos.
Picture Credits: Goeff Williams
Organizing photos isn’t all that tough; you just need to follow a few simple steps. Once the initial battle with the old photos ends, all you’d need to do is follow a pattern, and you can save yourself from ever getting digitally disorganized again!
Step 1: Locate all you photos from all you devices, store them in one device, and group them in one folder.
Step 2: Inside your main folder, have mini folders, year-, month- or date-wise.
Step 3: Label every sub-folder with the event name for easy recognition. Eg. ABC’s Birthday
Step 4: Rename you photos according to events. Eg. ABC Birthday 1, ABC Birthday 2.
Step 5: Take a backup of all your photos.
The first and most important tip is to plan. Like all things, planning is important while organizing photos too. Decide how you want to segregate all your photos. The easiest and most common way is to do it chronologically. In case you’re a professional and have too many photo shoots in a month, then you should definitely put a thought into how you’d like to save the multiple-shoot photos. The next tip is to edit or cull your photos. Too many times, we just keep lots of photos just because we can. Changing this habit is important in learning how to organize your photos. Delete photos that are duplicates or are simply bad. Keep only the good shots and discard anything that seems like a waste of space.
The third tip while organizing photos is understanding how you import your photos from your camera. This may seem like a trivial task and the lazy part of you will argue that ‘drag and drop’ is the best technique there is, but trust me, fight that laziness. Chances are, when you take care while importing photos, you’ll find some photos that can be used for other purposes.
It may have happened a lot of times when you know that you have an old photo that might be perfect for a project you’re currently working on, but that photo is lost somewhere in your digital-photo jungle. So avoid this and use tools like Photoshop Elements, Aperture, Lightroom, etc. that includes good importing tools, and organize your photos.
The next tip is continuation from the last one. Cloud storage is a boon for your digital photos. Why? Well, because it not only lets you store the photos, but also organize them effectively without worrying about importing photos (just in case you were going to be lazy, after all). In cloud storage, you can add tags to all of your photos. This instantly groups them under the tags. So the next time you’re looking for a photo of, say, a flower, you simply search under the ‘flower’ tag, and voila!
Lastly, the most important tip, back up! Save a copy on your cloud storage, use Google, Dropbox, Flickr, etc., or invest in a good-quality hard disk. It really doesn’t matter where you do it, as long as you do it. Make sure you take the backup frequently. Do it every time you add new photos, because losing photos is a cardinal sin and should be avoided at all costs.Now all you need to do is follow these tips and you can be a ninja as organizing digital photos.
Now, all you need to do is follow these tips and you can be a ninja in organizing digital photos.
Also Read : The Next generation Photo management system