Digital pictures are all the rage these days, and people are loading photos onto their computers at a record pace. The primary problem with this digital photo explosion is that people still can not find that specific photo when they really need to to. This can lead to massive frustration as you sort through hundreds if not thousands of digital images on your hard drive. The good news is that a simple folder system on your computer can organize those digital photos in no time flat.
The first thing that you need to do is work out an information tree. That is, you need to come up with all the categories that you would like to sort these photos into. Write down all the names of all the members of your immediate family. Stick to the immediate family for now. Then write down some general life tags such as places, things, nature, scenery, animals, plants, beach, and so on. Write down all the categories that you can think of for your pictures.
This is the point when things can get tricky. You need to now place these categories into order of importance. For this example, I will use digital photos of people. For the categories under people, I would use the name of myself, my wife, and my kids. I would then make folders labeled “other family” and “other people” as well. This would cover the folders for all people for me.
Next you go into your picture master file on your computer, make a master folder labeled “people,” and drag and drop all the digital pictures into that folder that have people in the picture. Now that you have all the people pictures in a folder, you would then open that folder and create sub-folders inside that master “people” folder. Label these with the tags from above.
As a control measure, you need to have a system for digital pictures that contain multiple people. What I do with that is I place any picture with me in it in my folder, regardless of who is in it with me. Then I use my wife as the next filter, and then the kids. After that, the pics go into “other family” and “other people” as they fit.
This system can be repeated with all the different types of digital pictures that you have to organize those photos. It can easily be applied to places, things, and any other labels that you want. It takes some time to initially get the digital photos organized, but once they are you can easily file future ones. The best part is, you will always be able to find that important digital photo when you want to.
