How do you organize your digital photos?

[amatahrain]

I want to make a couple of photo books from the thousands of digital pictures I have. I am good on the picture book part but part of me feels like I need to edit down my digital photo collection. We upload everything from our phones, ipad and cameras. Some shots are blurry and some are very similar to each other. Do you keep a separate folder for those or just delete them? I guess I'm having a hard time deleting them even though I would never print them.

[Pinky]

I have folders separated my year and months. Every few months I upload from camera and phone (using same naming strategy for both so they stay in chronological order). Then I delete the bad ones. And if I have several good ones of the same moment I try to just pick one to keep and delete the others.

I take way too many pictures so I have to stay on top of them. I also print pics for an actual photo album to cover each year. So 300 or so favorites from the year printed. We love looking at our albums with DD.

[redhookmom]

Mine are organized by date. I have no problem deleting and do so when I upload. I only need a photo or two to capture a memory. And, keep those photos that are just great photos. If there are too many it becomes overwhelming and I would be likely to never do anything with them.

[mom2khj]

I don't keep anything blurry. Or if it's a bad shot. I take so many pictures, it's easy for me to delete the bad ones.

They are saved on an external drive, which is backed up to an online backup service.

I also upload them all to an online photo site (I use Zenfolio). If I, or someone in my family, wants to order prints I upload just those (or the event) to Shutterfly. I upload just my favorites to Flickr to share, but I *just* started using it.

I only order prints of some favorites for displaying around the house. I used to put them all in books, but it got too time consuming and takes up SO much space. When the kids want to look at photos, we just pull them up online or through the photo-site app on DH's iPad.

[larig]

I use a Mac, have photos from my iPhone and dslr. Photo stream allows me to import from phone by month. I use iPhoto and iPhoto library manager to keep things organized. iLM allows you to split you library into smaller pieces--I highly recommend it to keep your library in a reasonable size. Mine are all backed up to an external via time machine hourly.

Mine are organized into smaller libraries by DS's age. Within each library I sort the pictures by month using the events feature. I also separate out big events, like Xmas or vacations that might have more pictures than normal. I do it by his age, because I make photo books from birthday to birthday.

I delete blurry shots, unless they were the only shot capturing something. Like DH took 3 pictures of ds and his great grandmother, and they are the only ones we'll ever have.

[Pear]

Ours are organized by month. Then I go into Windows Photo Gallery and tag the good shots.

[candaceb]

I have a "best of" folder for each month. That's where I look when I'm making things like photo books and calendars but sometimes I end up going to the other photos if I need something to fit a spot, even if it isn't the best. I try to delete the worst photos from the camera/iPhone before they get to the computer.

[squimp]

I organize by season or occasionally by special events. I delete everything that is blurry, and try to only keep the best of a series of pics, or I would end up with so many duplicates. I also try to upload to shutterfly very frequently so I have an out of the house backup.

[maestramommy]

We store them on our hard drive organized by month and year. Every year we go through and cull all the ones we don't want, like blurry ones, duplicates, not-so-great, and just plain meh pictures. Then Dh saves a year's worth on a CD.

[BDKmom]

Ours are saved by year, then month, then event, if any. I try to delete bad shots or duplicates when I am uploading from the camera. At the end of the year, I do a "best of" folder from the year. Then I use that folder to make photobooks for the grandparents. Probably would be better if I started the "best of" folder at the beginning of the year and added to it throughout the year, but, so far, I always forget until I'm getting ready to start making photobooks.

[Pinky]

Probably would be better if I started the "best of" folder at the beginning of the year and added to it throughout the year, but, so far, I always forget until I'm getting ready to start making photobooks.

I need to start a "best of" folder too... its a bit of a daunting task to find the best ones after a whole year of pictures. :)