Sunday, October 24, 2010

The Blessings of Technology...


I was recently in charge of creating a slideshow of old family pictures for a party. I spent a long time going through files and files of digital pictures stored on my computer. I obviously do not have a good organization system. My question today:

How do you store your digital pictures?

Do you have a way of labeling or sorting pictures to find them easily later on?


How do deal with large file sizes with large amounts of pictures or those with high resolution?

Any general tips on picture organization?


Thanks!

5 comments:

Kelly A. said...

Download Picasa. It's free. You can label and organize your pictures easily and you can even do a little editing. I am not one of those technology witty people and I totally think it is easy to use.

Tannie Datwyler said...

I like to organize my pictures on my own - and although I use picasa for editing, I don't use it for organizing. I like that idea though.

This is what I do. I create A LOT of folders and sub-folders. This requires quite a bit of clicking, but it is so easy to find what I want.

My main folders are:

My Immediate Family
My Husband's Family
My Family (my mom and dad)
Friends

Then under these are sub folders. Under our immediate family folder I have a folder for each year. I then orgainze the photos by month. Within the months there MIGHT be a subfolder if we did something big (ie a huge family trip). Also under my family folder is a folder for each of my children. I like to separate their pictures from the rest because I make yearbooks for them. My kids have sub folders that are labled for each year and then within each year labeled for each month. I hope that makes sense....

My other folders are smiliar. Under Richard's family I have a year folder and then events inside that year.

I hope that helps a little. I can show you on my computer next time you are here. :)

Kelly A. said...

Tannie, you are so good at organization! I love the way your brain works :)

I just thought I would explain better how you can organize pictures in Picasa, just to give another option and then you decide what works best for you :)

So in Picasa at the bottom right hand corner there is a button called "tags." Just click on a picture and then click on that button after. You can type as many tags as you want. For example if I was tagging a picture of my kids in their Halloween costumes I could type "Halloween, 2010, each of their individual names, pumpkin, Cinderella, October, fall" etc. Then when you do a search any of those words (in addition to the name of the folder you put them in) will bring up that picture, making any picture very easy to find. Hope that helps :)

Delia said...

I also prefer to make my own folders. I do one for each year of our family pictures. So we have 2002-2010 folders...for each year we have been married. Then in each of those year folders the pictures are sorted into month folders. Within the month folders I may have a trip, or holiday that I took a ton of photos for, so I make a sub folder for that. Otherwise that is it. When I label my photos I just put the date and slide it into the appropriate month folder.

Then for photos I take for my hobbies I have my own folder which I sort the same way. My husband likes to dabble in photography too so he has his own folder sorted by topic because he prefers that. It keeps things nice for us...but you really have to do whatever works for you. :)

Jes said...

I do the same as Delia, but have a few more folders for extra things like Tnnie does here and there. (for example I have a 'daddy book' that I made for Dan and update with him for Father's day each year with pictures of him and the kids, their handprints that year, drawings/letters to him etc... so for specific projects like that I have extra folders for :) )