Organizing Your Digital Photos

The invention of the digital camera brought a new world to photography lovers. Gone were the days of stuffing memories into dusty boos and boxes that weren't used for years, leaving family outings and summer vacations to languish in obscurity. Now we had computers to house all our memories, to store all the miscellaneous photos of a lifetime's worth of experiences. Now, the piles of unorganized clutter in our attic became piles of unorganized clutter on our desktop. This eventually led to another problem: how do we clean up electronic chaos?

With the sharp increase of households that own computers and Internet access, along with the increase in interest of digital photography, the need for digital photo albums and scrapbooks has arisen. It's far too easy to misplace a photo on your computer, especially when you now have to search for "Rachel_and_Toby218723.jpg" instead of "that cute picture of your cousin and the dog". A computerized photo album will help corral all your wayward photos and put them in one place for you to enjoy.

The first thing to do when creating a digital photo album is to rename every photo to something short and easy to remember. The default titles your camera gives the photos may make sense to the camera, but unless you can follow its computerized logic chances are those titles may as well be in a foreign language. Accurate titles are greatly important if you want to get a handle on the situation. One possibility is to create chronological format you can actually follow. Computers will sort your files in alphabetical order whether you like it or not, so be careful not to name them with descriptive titles or by month (i.e."Tom_and_BBQ_mishap", "May_02", etc.) You're better off starting with the year, then the number of the month, then the day. For example, "20070317_parade" will make a lot more sense to both you and the computer, and the automatic alphabetizing feature on your computer won't interfere with the chronological categorizing.

Once all the pictures are properly labeled, the next step is to make different folders on your computer to house the different photos you have. Here you get a little more leeway in the naming process, as long as the system makes sense to you. You can name them after what event they cover, or a certain theme (i.e. animals) or subject. This way you can find the photo you want much faster when you're in the mood for it. If you want to relive the memories of your family's Easter gathering from last year, you can reach those pictures much more easily than slogging through a digital wasteland looking for pictures matching "Easter", "family" or "Uncle Ed diving headfirst into a punchbowl" (which, more than likely, you have pictures covering more than a single event matching those descriptions.)

Here come the two cardinal rules of all things computerized. First, always back up your photos. Second, always back up your photos. Even in the computer age, things can go horribly, horribly wrong, and with a single digital hiccup you can easily wave bye-bye to years of your memories if you didn't plan ahead. Thankfully, these days there are a number of options for archiving your pictures. The simplest option is an archiving program to save all your files to a Zip Drive or CD. If you follow this method, be sure to label the disk or drive lest you run into the same type of problem with organization that you did on your computer. Write whatever you want on the disk itself, but make sure you change the name as the computer reads it; CD burning software will usually suggest you name your CD, but you need to make sure your computer can identify the CD as well as you can before you do.

It's true that digital cameras have made the task of capturing memories much easier than in the past, but that convenience turns into a paperless organization nightmare if you don't take control. Organizing your photos into a computerized album will help you view your memories and share them with friends anytime you want.