Tips for Organizing Digital Photos

Many of us love to save every moment of lives on a digital camera. After all, it comes at no cost. All you need is a good digital camera and a computer to save and view the digital photos. But with tons of photos, it is not easy to stay organized - if you need to locate a photo from a family gathering you attended a year ago, it can take a while to skim through your pictures. Proper labeling and categorization can help you organize your digital photos. Here are more tips.

• Create a logical directory structure in your computer. Have a folder for related pictures pertaining to one event. Give the folder a thoughtful and meaningful name. When you transfer the digital photos from the camera to the folder, you will be able to set a default name for the photo files - use a descriptive name that you are likely to search for on the computer if you wanted to locate those files. This name will be followed by a number suffix for each photo. Add a readme file in the directory if you want to add special notes.

• Add the year to the name if you prefer to archive by date.

• Add another folder for the same event where you can store edited and enhanced photos.

• Delete unwanted pictures - blurry ones, duplicates, etc. to make space on your computer.

• Backup your pictures regularly on a CD or DVD. Label the storage media clearly to stay organized.

• You can also use a photo management software to help you organize your pictures. The programs provide feature on top of what a PC or a Mac provides - you can tag photos with keywords, rename a batch of photos and backup the pictures.

• Some people like having a timestamp on their photos as it gives one basis for classification. Most digital cameras allow you to print time and date on the picture.

• If you a photography enthusiast, you probably use the maximum resolution on your digital camera to get the best pictures. So your files will be huge and you may have thousands of pictures using up much of the hard disk on your computer. To use your computer for things other than storing digital photos, you should consider using an external hard disk with over 200 GB of space. That way you can free up space on your computer and effectively store all your pictures in one place.

All it takes is a good plan and a little discipline to organize your digital photos. Cultivate the habit of transferring your pictures to a computer soon after an event so that you can free up the memory card for the next round of photos.