How To Organize Your Photos On Your Computer 2021

[Pages:16]HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR COMPUTER

In 5 Easy Steps

Angela Goodhart

How To Organize Your Digital Photos in 5 Easy Steps

Table Of Contents

Get On Top of the Digital Chaos!

2

How to Organize Your Digital Photos.

3

1. Create a Folder Structure on Your Main Computer

4

2. Organize Old Digital Photos

5

3. Organize Your Physical Photos and/or Negatives.

9

4 . Back Up Your Digital Photos

10

5. Showcase Your Photos!

11

Conclusion

12

Goodhart Photography 2021

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How To Organize Your Digital Photos in 5 Easy Steps

One of the most common questions I hear from my clients is how to organize your digital photos. This makes perfect sense of course, since many of them have been taking digital pictures since 2004 ? the year digital cameras became more popular than lm cameras ? or earlier.

Chances are you've taken thousands of photographs -- possibly tens of thousands of photographs since then. And yet, chances are also that you aren't happy with the way you store and organize your photographs. They are probably spread across several memory cards, CDs and USBs, Facebook, and computer hard drives. And now you are desperate to learn how to organize your photographs.

This ebook will walk you through how to organize your digital photos step by step!

Goodhart Photography 2021

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How To Organize Your Digital Photos in 5 Easy Steps

Get On Top of the Digital Chaos!

It's time to get organized! Our photographs contain our precious memories and observations about our lives. It is essential that we learn to organize and preserve them -- otherwise, why take them if we can't nd them when we need them or if they will disappear when our hard drive crashes?

How much time have you wasted looking for that one perfect photo of Susie tasting ice cream for the rst time at age 3 for her high school yearbook? How devastated would you be if your computer crashed and you did not have a backup of your photographs?

I've had two clients over the years ask me for their wedding photographs after their computer crashed and they lost them. And one of my good friends paid thousands of dollars to have her family photos rescued from a computer that crashed.

Losing photographs causes so much heartache, and it's completely avoidable with a little bit of discipline and e ort.

How to Organize Your Digital Photos.

So let's get started with how to organize your digital photos.

A good starting goal is to have all of your images in a single location, organized in a logical, easy to remember way, and backed up to at least two locations.

Goodhart Photography 2021

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How To Organize Your Digital Photos in 5 Easy Steps

There are ve main steps to achieving this goal.

First, create a folder structure for organizing your digital les, and from here on out, use it! All new photographs that you take should be loaded into this folder format. This step shouldn't take very long, although it may take a while for this to become habitual.

The second step is to gather and organize all of your old digital photos into the le structure you created in step 1.

The third step is to gather, digitize, and organize all of your old physical photos and negatives into your le structure.

The fourth step is to create a backup system for your computer.

And nally, you'll want to showcase and actually use some of the best photographs you take!

These steps are all described in more detail below.

1. Create a Folder Structure on Your Main Computer

A strong, useful folder structure is the rst step in how to organize your digital photos. The structure should be meaningful to you, and more importantly, for future you and for your descendants.

Goodhart Photography 2021

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How To Organize Your Digital Photos in 5 Easy Steps

The highest level directory of your computer should have a top level folder named "Pictures". If you don't have a "Pictures" directory, create one.

Within "Pictures", create an "00 Inbox" folder and a folder for each year you'll be organizing photographs.

The "00 Inbox" is where I put photos to sort, that I've downloaded from FB or that friends have emailed me, etc....

The reason I label it with "00" in the front is so that it will sort at the top of my Pictures folder.

Goodhart Photography 2021

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How To Organize Your Digital Photos in 5 Easy Steps

Within each year folder, I create a folder for each event or subject. I end the folder name with the year too, in case there are multiple years where that speci c subject or event was photographed.

I also have a "00 Miscellaneous" folder in each year for all of the images that I just have 1 or 2 snaps of that don't warrant a separate folder.

I used to keep month folders, but that just added another layer of clicking if I was trying to nd a speci c image from Meadowlark Gardens and I couldn't remember whether I was there in April, May or June. Why not just have the folder Meadowlark Gardens nested directly under the "year" folder?

Within each "event/subject" folder, I leave my favorite images visible and I put the other good images in a "shoebox" folder. I delete any image I don't like.

Now that you've got the system in place, try to make time every day or at least once a week to put the photos you've taken into the system in the correct folders.

2. Organize Old Digital Photos

The next step in how to organize your digital photos is to bring all of your old digital les, prints and negatives into your system.

Goodhart Photography 2021

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How To Organize Your Digital Photos in 5 Easy Steps

2a. Find Your Old Digital Photos. The rst part of this is nding all of your old photos. Here are just a few of the places your photographs may be hiding:

Instagram Facebook Other Social Media Email messages Your old computers Your current computer CD-Rs

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