Wednesday, October 11, 2006

WFMW: Organizing Digital Photos


This Works-for-Me Wednesday is inspired by my own mistake. As soon as Caleb was born we started taking tons of pictures of him. I would load them onto the computer and name them cutesy names like "bad hair day," "acting silly," "tackle box 001," etc. This was fine (I thought) until I was catching up his scrapbook and I couldn't tell when those pictures were taken. (You can go into each file and see the date it was taken, but I wanted to be able to glance at a file of pictures and know which month of Caleb's life they were taken to make putting together the scrapbook easier.) Now I name the set of pictures I'm uploading things like "New Mexico Trip 7.06" or "September 22 2006" so the date is right there in front of me and I know how old Caleb was when the pictures were taken. It saves me tons of time and stress!

Works for Me!

Go check out Shannon's blog for more great ideas!

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a good idea. 4 of us here have digital cameras and have too many pictures without individual labels (though each grouping is labeled, like "Jesse's 13th Birthday.") That's something I want to tackle some time.

Andi @ udandi / Lunch It Punch It said...

That's how I do it and then using Picasa, I can glance through thumbnails and find what I am looking for and then go to the acutal folder.

I haven't posted my WFMW, yet...

Anonymous said...

That's a great idea....I've got
so many pictures that I need to organize on my computer!

I have recently invested in Creative Memories' photo software.
I haven't yet used it (*sigh*), but
it looks really nice for tackling this job!
--Tracy

Anonymous said...

You are so right, great suggestion.

Anonymous said...

I've done the same thing and had to learn the hard way too.

Katrina @ Callapidder Days said...

Yep, I have to do this too - I usually organize by month, and then sub-folders with the day. It's so easy to take a million pictures and then lose track of them!

John and Christy said...

I recently went digital - its great but so much more time consuming. My modification on your technique is that I label the folders "2006 July-Aug-Sept", that way, the computer will arrange the folders in order by year & I'll have four main folders per year. My photo program (came with Nikon camera) will display the pictures sectioned by photo date, which is also nice. Especially since I forget to rename the batches when I import. :)

owlhaven said...

..for all...

owlhaven said...

...your comments!

Barb said...

I finally realized I have over 2000 photos stored on this computer. I wish I'd organized them a little better when I was downloading like crazy. Getting it all straightened out, by date, is a winter project for sure. I waste way too much time looking for one specific photo.

Rae said...

I used to do the same exact thing with all of my pictures, my laptop computer was purchased solely so I could have a different computer to use without all my pictures stored on it (the desktop had that job) And now I find myself still uploading a bunch of pictures to my laptop, but now I name all of the folders according to month and all of the pictures I upload according to date, it's so much easier. Great tip! =)

Unknown said...

I love that the digital photo has the date stamp embedded in there--it has saved me from wondering. I save mine only by date, but I like your specific event AND date.

Anonymous said...

i learned that the hard way, too! gah.

5KidMom said...

Came over from Owlhaven.

This is a good tip. I learned the hard way too.

Nettie said...

My husband, bless his heart, recently went through and reorganized all ours. He listed them like this:

2006-01-18 Nettie's Birthday

It's fabulous because we take pictures almost every day, the computer automatically sorts them by date, and we can easily find them by topic if we don't remember a date.

Who knew we'd ever take this many pictures back in the film and print days!

GiBee said...

Yup! I do the same thing!



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