How do YOU organize your digital photos??

[papal]

This is a spinoff on the photo organization question.
I have been putting off getting a digital camera FOREVER because of the Photo Organization part of it. I am just too anal about something like this and can just see unnamed (dc000721.jpg for example) pics all over my computer and I fear never being able to find anything.

What is your naming method for folders and pics? How do you do backups? Any other tips that may help me cross to the digital side?

[egoldber]

I just arrange them by date. We have folders for each year and subfolders for each month. If we happen to take a lot of pix one month, I might make a subfolder in the month folder (like "Halloween 2004" or "Disney October 2004"). I have never found it to be hard to find anything. Certainly far less onerous than having to search through multiple hard cover albums or unnamed enveloped of photos, LOL!

We back up our pix to CD every 2-3 months.

HTH,

[Joshuasmommy]

We keep them by event like Apple orchard, Halloween, 1st birthday etc. If they are just of Joshua playing or something then we will do a folder for the month.

[Mom2Miri]

We just arrange it by date. Also, we started using Adobe Photoshop Album and like it so far.

Helen & Mirielle 2/25/03

[McQ]

That's what we do too. We back up to CD in the same structure.

Then I also have a folder that has my all time favorites in it. DH has one too.

We also have a folder of the ones we've had printed and put in an album. Just in case (and heaven forbid) anything happen to the album we wouldn't have to dig through all the folders again.

Allison
~ mama to Declan 3.24.03 and Meghan 8.26.04

[miki]

I use Photoshop Album also. It has a feature that lets you do incremental backups to CDROM.

[AvasMama]

I am loving Photoshop Album! We got it bundled with Elements and it is very easy to use and navigate and it integrates well with Elements for editing photos.

I used iPhoto on my Mac before I switched over to the PC dark side and I have to say that Photoshop Album is much easier than iPhoto was. If you can wait a couple of months, you can just borrow my copy :)

I backup onto CD every few months, but after my laptop crashed Monday, I will definitely be doing that more often, like weekly! Fortunately, I was able to rescue all my pictures before the computer died completely, but I might not be that lucky again.

Robyn & Ava

[zuzu]

We organize ours by date, and the software we have (I think it's Photshop Album) also lets you create multiple tags to help further organize. So while everything will be in date order, we've tagged pictures by trip ("Florida 2/03") or event ("Halloween '03") or person ("pics with Grandma") too, so we can view them by the tag themes too. I really like that multiple tags can be used for each picture. DH is in charge of backing up the pictures, so I know nothing of that, other than he does it monthly, and it's pretty easy and quick.

Printing out the ones I really like and getting them into an album is another story, and something I don't do often enough.

Melissa, mom to Sarah (5/03)

[DebbieJ]

Another Photoshop Album user here!

~ deb
Mommy to my sweet boy
B born 12/03
http://www.windsorpeak.com/dc/user_files/10023.jpg http://www.windsorpeak.com/dc/user_files/10029.gif

[Katia]

I say take the plunge! :-)

My pictures are stored in folders by date...for example, yesterday's pics would be in 2004_12_14. That way, I can always sort the pictures by date regardless of whether I'm using any other photo management software. It's also the same way I used to organize my film camera pics -- in a box with dividers by date.

I never, ever rename pictures anymore...too tedious. I use Jasc Photo Album (similar to Adobe Photoshop Album), and it's just not necessary if you use something like that. It's easy to view photos by date range, regardless of what folder they're actually stored in, and you can use keywords to further identify the photo without actually renaming the file itself. So...instead of renaming a photo "Leela_on_swing34.jpg", you could just leave the random name as-is and use keywords "Leela" and "playground" to make future searching easier. But if you're like me, 99% of your pics are probably of your DC so it's not really necessary to have a special keyword! :-)

For me, the biggest challenge is weeding out less-than-perfect pictures. I take so many more pics than I would with a film camera, but that doesn't mean they're BETTER, LOL! I'm trying to sort through my backlog and only keep the best ones, but it's time-consuming, and I'm tired and not very disciplined anyway.

HTH!