How do you organize your photos on your computer? About This Page:

[Awdrey]

Not sure if I posted this in the right room or not.
I first thought if I organize my photos by year then in the year folder have sub folders by months would be a good way, but if you are looking for a specific pic. but do not know what month it was taken in let alone what year, you could spend hours trying to find that photo. I also thought it would be good to have a folder for each kid, each holiday or special events, but this too can get frustrating. I would love to know how you guys do this. TIA

[Caldercup]

I think you might find more info on this topic in the The Darkroom: Photography and Videotaping

In terms of my WDW vacation photos, I have a "Previous Trips" subfolder in my Disney folder. Within that, I have subfolders for each vacation I've taken. Within each vacation's folder, I have a folder for Pictures and then I file them by the day they were taken. So each vacation's picture folder will have "Day one - 2007-11-30" and a Day Two and so on and so on.

I know it seems a little folder-happy, but it works for me.
Eileen

[chezp]

I file them by holiday, then with sub-folders for each day, which works fine for me.

[DopeyGirl]

I upload so often and check the dates taken on each photo when I do.

I organize "regular" photos by year with a subfolder for each month . . . Disney trips get their own subfolders in the folder for the month of the trip (in whatever year) and I organize THOSE in subfolders by day of the trip they were taken.

[LizardCop]

Here's some suggestions from the Scrapbook section

Organizing Photos

[Tonichelle]

They're on CDs and cataloged accordingly that way RAW And JPEG.

[emtpej]

The easyshare SW defaults to a new folder for the day you upload.
I then copy those to another folder by the name of the event and resize them all and then upload those to photobucket.
Works for me, so far.

[disneyfan2000]

They are organized by year-month folders and then in each month broken down in day folders. I might eventually take out all the pics from the day folders and leave them in a month folder, but not for now. I usually view them using Picasa. I will eventually tag them for special events, like holidays, Disney, etc. So my pictures folder looks like this:
2003-01
2003-02
2003-04
etc....

and in each of those folders, there are folders that look like this
01-01-2003
01-05-2003
etc....

Picasa orders them by date, so even if they weren't ordered in my folders they'd be ordered anyway.

Also, with Picasa its extremely easy to upload them to a website.
And google gives you 1-2GB? free storage. Can't beat that.

[WillCAD]

I have a folder for each year, and under that I have a folder for each day. Since I don't take pics every day, I don't have 365 folders under each year - I generally have 20-30 folders.

Each year gets an index page with a chart describing the contents of each day folder.

Each day folder gets an index page showing the thumbnails of all that days pics.

I copy this method to my web photo gallery, as well.

Here is my index for 2008 thus far:
Photos - 2008

[dejavu]

I have a folder for each year and then have sub-folders for each event with a month also listed. So in 2007, I have a March Birthday Party folder, May Band Concert folder, June Vacation folder, September Walk4Life folder, an October Pumpkin Farm folder, and a December Christmas folder.

Organizing pictures can be an arduous task- good luck!! When you're done, you can come organize the multitude of boxed pictures I have in the basement starting in 1984! (I'm sure half of them would've been deleted if digital cameras existed back then!)

[modisney]

I have a new iMac with iPhoto which I really like. iPhoto imports them and keeps them in "photos" which is arranged chronologically by year and date. You can then create "events" from your photos IE: Vacation 2008 etc. iPhoto also lets you assign keywords and ratings which is a great way to find photos. You can also search for photos based on descriptions and dates. Buying the iMac was well worth it just to get iPhoto. There's online tutorials to get you started and answer questions. I also purchased a year's worth of "one-to-one" sessions at the Apple Store. I gather my questions about iPhoto or any other aspect of my computer, schedule the appointment and I'm good to go! Best $100 I've ever spent. iPhoto even has a few simple editing tools with it. It's very easy and now my daughters (9 and 12) have their own digital cameras and their own iPhoto libraries.