Photo Organization

Digital Photo & Print Organization
Since purchasing my first digital camera in early 2002, organizing photos has become a bigger challenge. With 35mm film, I felt as though I was limited by the number of exposures on the roll and would take a photo cautiously - not wanting to run out of film and miss something. These days, I have the opposite problem - too many photos! I keep a 1GB card in my digital camera and snap away. On the trip to Disney, between my camera and the photo CD we purchased from Disney, I have 365 photos!! Enough to make anyone's head spin.

On my computer, I simply store all my photos in the My Pictures folder. Inside are folders for each year. Then I have folders for each event within the annual folders labeled by date and event. For example, my Disney photos are in a folder with the title "Nov - Disney Trip."

Having over 300 photos for one event can be a little much. For starters, it eats up more of the hard drive space, but also can make it difficult to find a specific photo I'm looking for. After transferring all photos from the camera card to the hard drive, I start flipping through them using the Windows Picture Viewer. As I find a photo that is "not good" [for me, this ranges from blurry to "why did I even take that?" ;) LOL ], I delete it. If I hesitate, I'll keep it for the time being.

Recently I added a folder to my 2007 Pictures titled "-to be ordered-" where I can drop copies of images I want to get printed so when I'm ready for prints, I don't have to search multiple folders and I don't need to worry about accidentally reordering a photo I've already had printed. (I jump between developing companies depending on which has the best prices at the time which can make a double order easy to do if I'm not paying attention.) After I've uploaded the images to a photo developing website, I delete those images from the "-to be ordered-" folder.

Finally, I back-up all of my digital images in two places - my Maxtor external hard drive and on annual CDs. Although I think I might start using DVDs as they have a greater capacity. All of my prints, are stored in Pioneer Space Saver Photo Albums. I love the slim design of these albums and as they are more for my reference and archiving than for show - it's not important to me to have "pretty" photo albums. I purchase the 144 pocket option online from Archival USA and add date labels on the spine using my label maker.


Older Photo Organization
I have lots of prints from both the "old" film days and those that were given to me by whomever took the photos. I store these separate from the digital print albums. Why? Well, I use the Pioneer albums as an index of my digital photos. A hard copy way to thumb through and see what I might like to work with when scrapbooking or just looking for a photo to share. I don't want to mix these with my film prints. I store my film prints in Rubbermaid Photo & Media Storage Boxes. Any groupings of a particular event, are sorted into photo envelopes from Archiver's. I like using these envelopes because of their archival quality and lined outside with room to list the contents. They keep the boxes orderly and help me locate an event quickly.