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Want a more organized way to store digital pictures?: 4 Things You Must Do

If you’re like many of our clients, you have a hunch that there must be a better way to organize and access your collection of digital pictures.  You know that what you’re currently doing prevents you from easily finding pictures when you need them and likely causes you frustration and wasted time.  You also may experience stress knowing that you really don’t know where all of your photos are because they are spread across your laptop, mobile device and cloud storage services and you worry because you are at risk of losing pictures because they are not backed up.

When you know you need a better way of organizing your digital pictures, you set out to learn what to do and then you experience a new sense of over-whelm and frustration because while the tools and strategies for managing digital pictures seem simple enough, the task of getting the thousands of your pictures into an organized system seems too daunting.  And then what?  How will you keep up with new in-coming pictures?  Many people stop their effort to organize their pictures here.  You’re not alone.

Want to try again to conquer your digital picture disorder?  We have a realistic plan for helping you break down the project into manageable steps and instructions for how to accomplish the 4 things you must do in order to organize your digital pictures.  Ready?  Let’s go.

 4 Things You Must Do to Organize Your Digital Pictures

  1. Define your goal for having a more organized collection of pictures.  Having clarity about why you want to organize your pictures will help you make better decisions about the process of organizing, what to keep and what to purge and how to organize pictures so you can access them meet your goal.  For the purpose of this article, the goals are to organize a digital photo collection so that it is easier to find pictures and to have a way to backup the photo collection.
  2. Select a software tool to help you manage pictures.  Windows Live Photo Gallery and Apple’s iPhoto are both good options.  If you consider other applications, keep in mind your photo organization goals and weigh these against the application’s features and cost.  Which ever application you choose, take some time to learn about it with online tutorials or an expert user.
  3. Establish and use a workflow plan for importing and organizing pictures.  Knowing what to do each time you have pictures to import and keeping to a consistent routine of importing, pruning, labeling and saving are the keys to staying on top of digital organization.  In her book Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life, Jill Duffy describes a simple workflow plan for organizing pictures.
    1. First, import pictures into your chosen application (ie iPhoto or Live Photo Gallery).
    2. Second, sort imported pictures into sets or albums and give them descriptive labels (more on this below).
    3. Third, prune your imported pictures.  The beauty of digital photography is the ease we have of capturing images and the volume of images we can store.  This is in stark contrast to the days of film where the expense of developing and space needed for storage were far greater.  Old habits die hard and many of us keep digital images that are badly composed, out of focus or show an image that is meaningless.  As a result of taking more pictures, we also keep many pictures that are duplicates or near-duplicates.  Decide today to not keep bad pictures.  Let them go.  You have permission to delete!  At this point in the picture organizing workflow plan, quickly look at the pictures you’ve imported.  Delete the bad and duplicate pictures.
    4. Fourth, label the pictures you choose to keep.  Most of the applications you will use to manage photos will sort pictures by date.  And you’ll label the set or album with a date and some descriptive detail.  It is also valuable to edit the actual image file name to something other than IMG_0351 for 2 reasons.  One, you may chose to change photo management software in the future and your album names and added metadata may be lost.  Second, if you clarify what the image is with it’s file name, you can use search tools and visually scan a directory of files to find the picture you’re looking for.
  4. Finally, back up your newly imported and organized pictures to your secondary storage repository.

So far we’ve described an organized strategy that will help you manage your digital pictures from today forward.  But what about the digital disaster that is your collection of pictures from the past?  Probably the main reason your digital photos are disorganized today is because the task of dealing the pictures from the past proved too over-whelming and time consuming.  The perfect solution is for you to import, sort, prune, label and backup all of these pictures into your system.  If you are like most people with large collections of pictures, this will takes weeks of time.  We recommend a strategy that isn’t perfect and is good enough.  It prioritizes consolidating your digital pictures so you can access them and backing them up so you can preserve them.  It will allow you to more effectively organize them in the future if you need to or when you have time.  This truly is the most cost-effective and reasonable way to keep your existing pictures and to move for with a more organized approach for managing all of the pictures your future holds. 

Here is how you go about consolidating your existing pictures.

  • Just like with real clutter in your home or office, before you can organize digital clutter, you have to bring it all to one place.  Many of us have digital pictures on our laptop hard drives, external hard drives, CDs, in email attachments, memory cards in cameras, on mobile devices and in cloud storage.  The first thing to do is to make a list of all the devices you use to take pictures and all of the places where you have pictures stored.
  • The second thing to do is to identify a place where you can consolidate all of your pictures. Consider using an internal or external hard drive as a primary storage place and a cloud-based storage repository for secondary (backup) storage.
  • It is a big time commitment to migrate thousands of pictures from various sources into one repository.  It is too much to do in one sitting.  Accept that it is a large project and set yourself up for success by breaking it down into smaller tasks like retrieving images from a memory card one day and downloading pictures from an old hard drive the next.  In the meantime commit to using your central picture repository from today forward.

Last words – The work of organizing a large collection of digital pictures is significant and time-consuming.  The best strategy is to use the ideas above to establish a workflow process for organizing your pictures from today forward.  Then, as you have time and need, incorporate your older pictures into your new organized system.

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