how to organise your digital photos.

While working on my photobooks recently, I got to thinking about how I organise my digital photos and how sharing this might help you get organised too. Having your pictures organised makes finding pictures and creating photobooks soooo much easier!

So here is how I do it... 

First of all, I save everything I do to my external hard drive. I do this for a lot of different reasons, but mainly because I can then take my hard drive and plug it in to any computer and have my work right there with me. Good for travel, good for school, good for everything really. However, I do recommend backing up your hard drive often and saving your documents/pictures in several different places... juuuussst incase (ifyaknowwhatImean).

So within my hard drive I have a few folders. My documents, scrapbook stuff, pictures, etc. I work mostly with "My Pictures" folder and that is where we are going to look today.

Within my pictures folder, I have many other folders broken up by year- starting all the way back in 2002 when I got my first digital camera for my 18th birthday :) Thanks mom and dad!



And let me tell you, there are some GEMS hiding back in those days! Like this one...

Or this one...

Or THIS ONE!!!

Wow, I miss my crazy friends and being 20 and college and sorority life.... sigh. I'm old!

(Yes, I just spent about an hour look at years 2002-2006; reliving my college days through these pictures. See, having pictures stored by year can make looking back really, REALLY fun, haha).

Moving on....

So, within each year I have broken the folders up by month. For example, if we look in 2012 we will see January through December for this year.

Then within each year I have three folders. Original. Edited. Blog. So if we look inside April 2012 we will see these folders (if you don't edit or blog your photos then you wouldn't need these folders).



Because I do edit and blog my photos, I always like to keep a copy of the original saved in this folder.  When you open this folder it looks like this.  The files come straight off my camera and into this folder for safe keeping.  They are in number order based on what file name my camera gives them so that actually keeps them in date order as well.



You can also look at them in thumbnail view if you want to get a better idea of what photos you are looking at.



After I save my original photos, I move on to editing some of them and saving them in the "edited" folder within the correct year. For example, I can find my edited photos from April 2012 in this folder.



Now this next step is the MOST IMPORTANT in my opinion. When saving your edited photos (or original photos if you don't edit) make sure you rename them!! I have come up with a VERY EASY way to rename my photos that will give you the most information and really help keep them organised. It goes like this....

Day Month Year- description of the event.001

For example: 18 April 2012- zoo045.jpg



So when I am looking back for pictures I can remember on 18 April 2012 we went to the zoo. I can search my pictures by day, month, year or description of the event. So easy!

Since I blog some of my photos, I move on to the stage of picking a few photos for the blog, putting my name on them and saving them under my "blog" folder in that particular month.



Soooo if I haven't lost you already... here is how I do it in five very simple steps:

1. My Pictures
2. Year Folder
3. Month Folder
4. Original/Edited/Blog Folder (skip this step if you only save one kind of copy)
5. RENAME YOUR PHOTOS: day month year- description

And there you have it friends. Easy as 1.2.3.4.5 :)