I LOVE taking pictures! I am usually the one with the camera at family parties trying to hold onto precious memories. Especially with my own little girl, I want to make sure I can preserve those moments that I can look back on. I love just as much is the having a digital camera and storing my photos on my laptop. But naturally comes the question on how to organize them.
This is what works for me:
As soon as I take pictures (or when I get around to it) I take everything from the memory and organize the pictures into folders on my laptop. These folders are always named with the date or if it was a vacation it will also include that.
Here is how it is broken down. In the folder labeled, My Pictures, I have several sub folders. Some named with a year, a person's name, or generic for pets.
In this pictures you can see the screen shot of my computer. It's a little hard to tell but the first several folders are named with a year. Starting 1998 (when I met Eduardo) to 2008. Then there are folders for people, pets, blog stuff and most importantly one named Olivia.
Once I click on the folder named Olivia, inside I find many smaller folders each named with a date. This way I know that these are pictures of Olivia and exactly what day they were taken on. No guess when trying to figure out how old she was or what we were doing.
In this screen shot you can see all the mini sub folders in Olivia's main folder.
At the end of the year, I will move this entire folder into the one labeled 2008 and start a new one for 2009 This way if I am trying to find pictures from Livy's first Christmas I head to the folder 2007 and click on December 25.
One very important thing when storing your pictures on your computer is that you risk losing everything if your hard drive crashes. This is SUPER scary and with that I recommend that you back-up you entire computer at least once a month onto an external hard drive. I store mine in the fire proof safe.
Head to Rocks in My Dryer for more Works for Me Wednesday tips!
7 Classy Comments:
I have started downloading all my photos each night. It only takes a few minutes. I also load them all into just one folder - the current month. It is similar to your system. I don't have any children, so mostly my photos are of my flip houses and stuff for my blog posts.
This is a personal recommendation - but I love love love Carbonite.com. It backs up everything on your computer and everytime you load in something new it copies it. If your harddrive crashes, carbonite has it.
Have a fabulous day!
Kristin
My WFMW post this week is Pack and Ship
This is pretty much how I store them too. It drives me crazy when my husband downloads pics and just leaves them anywhere.
So we organize our photos EXACTLY the same way. Somtimes I think we should have been sisters, honestly!
This is a great organizational method to keep all photos in order! I do something similar on my desktop, except I keep everything organized by year, and then my sub-folders are broken down by event or time, regardless of the person in the photo. This helps so that if I am searching for photos from a specific event, I don't have to search in various folders for several different photos because three different people are in some of the photos...does that make sense?
Moving on...I think your idea is great! One thing I invested in when I started becoming serious about photography was an external hard drive. It was about $100, and completely out of my budget, but totally worth the money spent. After I upload my photos to my desktop and organize them appropriately, I attach my external hard drive and re-copy them to it. They are still on my computer, but now they are saved to an external hard drive so that if anything happens to my PC all photographic memories are preserved.
Maybe I should do this for WFMW next week :)
Wow, you are so organized! I need to follow your good example...especially with how many pictures I take. I love the photos from the Alpine loop too. Great colors, and of course Olivia is as cute as ever!
I thought I had a lot of pictures. I do something similar but not near as organized. Though I know I need to be more organized adn I need to back up my pics. I don't have an external hard drive so I'll probably use discs, or use something like Flikr. Are they "safe" on those sites.
Hi, I wrote about something similar here:
http://organizingyourphotos.com/
My version is much more complex, but works EXTREMELY well. Let me know what you think of it. :)
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