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!

[LucyG]

This is exactly how we save ours. I burn pictures to a disk at least once a week, and sometimes more often. When our old hard drive crashed, we came very close to losing every digital picture taken during DD's first year. It scared me silly. I was literally ill at the thought of it. Thankfully, I had burned them all to disk only days before the crash. Now, I just feel better if I burn them at least weekly. Every few months, I go through and print (at Walmart or Shutterfly) some of the best ones for albums. I like having albums to browse through and hold, though I know that many people keep all the photos on computer and never print. Really, the organization of our digital pictures has been much easier than keeping up with film prints and negatives (though we still do a little of that).


http://www.gynosaur.com/assets/ribbons/ribbon_emerald_18m.gif[/img][/url]
21 months and counting!

[new_mommy25]

I have a folder named Angie that is filled with sub-folders like December 2003, November 2003, web-ready etc. As for pics I name them by date and letter. For example I'll have 12-10-04a, 12-10-04b. If I took more than 26 pictures that day I'll do something like 12-10-04a1. My folder is in the C drive.

I also burn all my pictures on to a CD by month and those are filed in a CD book. I actually have two CD books because I am so paranoid that I'll lose one.

[amp]

My husband thinks I'm waaaay to anal about this, but we do what others have done. All pics get loaded into the Canon pics folder. In the folder are subfolders for each month (2004 December). Within that folder I usually subdivide them further into things like "December videos" (or camera takes them), "Cats", "First Snow", "Gramma & Grandpa Visit", or whatever special event or funny thing happened that I want to remember. They are all simply in the order of their file name, which really is just numbers but end up being chronological as a result.

John thinks I divide them too much, but for me, it makes them easier to navigate when I'm trying to find a pic to send to someone or whatever.

And BTW, I will NEVER go back to film cameras unless my digital is broken. I hesitated to go digital, and now I could kick myself for waiting so long! I love my pics so much more now that I can actually know what shots are good right away. I used to be much more stingy with film pics, and I always thought I got the good shot, but rarely did I get a gem. Now I have lots of gems and I love knowing I got the shot right away!

[amp]

This is a great idea Allison! I always have to go digging to find out if I already printed/ordered a print of a pic, but with this technique, I could just refer to the folder. I'm going to steal this idea, as well as the favorites one. Thanks for the tip!

[papal]

dh is going to kick me in the butt for changing my mind AGAIN. Why can't I have both, my dream digital camera AND a new computer with a superdrive and lots of memory!!! Why can't we win the stinkin' lottery!!!!

Looks like organization is pretty straightforward.. why is this so scary for me? I fear never getting printouts and never putting in albums. Like I am doing that with my film prints anyway!!

[amp]

I had the fear of not getting printouts. And a lot of times I don't. But I still find that I get many more good shots, to print, put in photo books, snapbooks, etc than I ever did with film. I really find that I love being able to order just the best shots than paying for film developing and being disappointed. Take the plunge....I swear you will never go back to film!

[egoldber]

Rashmi, hard drive space is SOOOO cheap. Have you seen what 100 gig drives are going for? Peanuts! I remember when DH and I bought our first 300 MEG drive eons ago and we were so excited to have all that HD space, LOL!

[pritchettzoo]

You don't need a superdrive as long as you have a CD burner. Our computer is 3 years old and it's dragging under all our pics, but it just takes longer to start up. With Album, you can burn the pics to CD (or DVD) and then just save "thumbnails" on your computer, which don't take up any space at all. Then if you select one of those pics to play with, it will tell you to insert whatever named disc it is on. Printing is a pain though. I have a zillion that I need to print! Definitely join Sam's or Costco because they're cheapest to print. :)

Anna
Mama to Gracie (Sept '03)
and One More (coming July '05)

[C99]

Every time I download digital photos, I name the folder with that date. Then I have them each organized into 2003 and 2004 folders. My husband backs them up on the server every so often. We also keep an online digital photo site and most of the photos also get uploaded there. It also gets backed up on the server whenever J. runs back ups. I use that to find photos and then I can just print directly to Shutterfly if I need to, or use the properties information to find the upload and date and corresponding folder.

[tarahsolazy]

I don't know if you decided to give up Macs for the dark Windoze side for your new computer, but I LOVE iPhoto. It organizes everything by date AUTOMATICALLY. I do make albums of specific events, etc, but otherwise, all the shots are already organized by date. I back up from my laptop HD to an external HD, but not often enough. My 180gig HD was like $150! Great investment (especially since I bought it with grant money, SHHH don't tell the NIH)

[papal]

No no.. not crossing to the dark side at all... getting a new iMac and replacing my old one. We are a windoze-free family. :)

[C99]

Hey now! You can use a PC and not use Windows. I used to run Star Office, but I had switch back over to Windows because my clients didn't know how to convert the files over to MS Word.

[amp]

We're getting a new iMac for Christmas too! I am so incredibly excited!