Hi everyone! My name is Sharon, however, I go by Sharon Kay in the digi world. This is my first time posting on Trixie’s blog.
I thought today we would talk about organizing photographs. I am going to show you how I organize mine, and then I would love to hear how you organize your photographs.
I have a master folder named PHOTOGRAPHS on my hard drive. There is one folder that is of random photographs I have come across that I have scanned. They need to have dates figured out and filed, but until I get that done, they stay in the NEW SCANS TO FILE folder. My main folders are all organized by YEAR. Inside each yearly folder are monthly folders. Inside the monthly folders, the photographs are organized by date.
I do have a few specialty folders where I file specific photographs separately. These are special scrapbooks that I create for my children, such as SCHOOL, SPORTS (divided by specific sports), Scouts (by child and Cub and Boy Scouts filed separately), and Robotics (divided by specific programs, i.e. BEST and FIRST Robotics and then by year). Here is an example of how I have filed my Sports themed photographs (each child has their own sport scrapbook).
Sound complicated? It’s really not, let me show you some examples:
Let’s take a look inside my file folder for year 2005. Inside this folder, I file my photographs by month (2005 03 is my March 2005 photographs).
Inside my March 2005 folder, I have folder for specific dates where I have taken multiple photographs for that event. Let’s take a look inside the folder labeled 2005 03 12 Tulsa.
Inside the folder, are my photographs I took when I was visiting relatives in Tulsa. I have labeled each photograph the same for this event , incrementing the number of the subsequent photographs. There are several different ways you can do this.
If you are using Photoshop, you can use Bridge and have it rename the photographs in sequential order as it downloads the photographs to your hard drive. This is the fastest way I have found to do this. You can also add your Metadata to each photograph (i.e. your copyright information) in case you may wish to share the photograph(s) at some point.
If you don’t use Photoshop, or already have your photographs on your hard drive, you can use a program to batch rename your photographs. I use the program called simply “Renamer”. You can find the program for free located here:
Read through the directions that comes with the Renamer program to find out exactly how to rename the photographs as you would like them to appear on your hard drive. I love this feature as you can have it replace the file names, strip parts of the file name and replace with other characters, and so much more. It is much faster to use Renamer than to rename each individual file manually, especially if you take as many photographs as I do.
I highly recommend renaming your photographs with descriptive names. I had 2 external hard drives fail on me within days of each other! I paid $700 to have my data retrieved (I got about 90% of my photographs and digital kits retrieved), however, some files were scattered and not in the original file folders! By having each of my photographs uniquely named, I was able to sort my photographs into their correct location!!! The photographs I had not finished renaming, however, were a lot more difficult to do this with as some of the metadata (i.e. date when photograph was taken) was lost on the recovery attempt. Negatives that were scanned, did not have the date the photograph was taken, so file names were very important. Many of the folders in the recovery had the name of “new folder”, I had to look at what was inside the folder in order to recreate with the correct name.
Now that I have explained my way of organizing photographs, I would love to hear how YOU organize your photographs! Please feel free to share with us your tricks and tips to organizing your photographs!
