Digital photo storage

[purplejackmama]

How do you organize your pictures? I need a system. I'm overwhelmed by the sheer number of pictures and lack of organization. Help me. Please :)

[mlktwins]

I have a folder for each year and, within that folder, a folder for each month. Sometimes I will make an additional folder in the monthly folder for special events like a vacation, trip to the zoo, etc. For me, it is easy to maintain once I have it set up.

[anneinco]

I do the same. Yearly folder and then monthly folders. If I am shooting something outside normal family stuff, that folder gets its own name and depending whether it is only during a specific month, I will file it in the month or year (for instance softball photos of my daughter will get filed under the month they happen but I end up with a softball folder for the team as well.

[KatieJ]

Panstoria sells a program I have used for 10 years now. Creative memories used to sell but since their bankruptcy Panstoria ( the original developer) has taken it over and sells them own version. It's cheap,enough and you can organize, edit, etc.

 

It's called FOREVER now. The product for photos is Historian.

Edited February 15, 2016 by KatieinMich

[purplejackmama]

I do the same. Yearly folder and then monthly folders. If I am shooting something outside normal family stuff, that folder gets its own name and depending whether it is only during a specific month, I will file it in the month or year (for instance softball photos of my daughter will get filed under the month they happen but I end up with a softball folder for the team as well.

Pardon my ignorance, does this method duplicate your photos? I'm thinking the monthly folders are a great idea but then I would like to have individual folders of my favorite kid pictures. But wouldn't that mean duplicating photos?

[Guest]

I use Shotwell and the default settings work for me: year/month/day.

 

Sometimes I'll rename older folders like "1997/December/25" "Christmas 1997" if I'm organizing scans of paper photos manually and plan on dragging 'n dropping the folders into a flash drive for exy or if it would be easier to sort through to make a slideshow for the grandfolks.

 

I don't remember all the dates once you get back to the '80s and before so I just do the best I can.

Edited February 15, 2016 by Guest

[anneinco]

Pardon my ignorance, does this method duplicate your photos? I'm thinking the monthly folders are a great idea but then I would like to have individual folders of my favorite kid pictures. But wouldn't that mean duplicating photos?

It can. However, it is only for situations like softball and hockey. Ones that I need to pull up that took place over multiple months. The last few years I filed them monthly and it was a pain to find the photos at the end of the season. I also don't put every softball photo of my daughter in the softball folder. Obviously I end up with a lot more of her than the other players lol. It is mainly set up so that I can quickly access them for the team.

[Baseball mom]

I do the same -- year folder with month folders. And month folders have some special folders (birthday, special trip etc.) Then in the year folder I have a baseball folder and sometimes a homeschool group folder. 

 

 

[goldberry]

I have the year/month folders.  If you do it like this:  2016-01, 2016-02, they stay in order.  Sometimes I have like this: 2015-07 California Trip for special events.

 

You can have a separate one for "best family pics" or "favorites". Yes, it does duplicate, but for us it's not that many.  If you didn't want to duplicate any, you could just move the original pic to the favorite folder, but rename the pic with the date and year so you would still retain the information, and the pics within that folder would be sorted by date.

Edited February 15, 2016 by goldberry

[mlktwins]

I also set up swim and baseball folders within the month the meets/games occurred. I take pics for the teams as well. I set up a folder for each meet/game with all the pics from that meet/game in it (these are pics of my my kids plus others). I also set up a folder for team pics for ones I upload for parents to view/order.

 

I don't have a favorites folder yet. Once I finally get a chance to work on my boys' pictures, I will set up a folder of just favorites by year. Yes, they will be duplicates, but I'm hoping to keep it to my top 100 for each year.

 

I have the older CM version (Memory Maker) of the new Historian software. I didn't like loading my pics into it other than the ones I want to edit. I like my folders the way I have them. I think if I had used Memory Maker from the beginning (and I really only started taking a lot of pictures when my boys were born so 10 years ago), I would have like it better. It does have a lot of great features such as face recognition and ability to label favorites, etc.

 

I also try to load my pictures often and keep it organized. It is much less stressful to spend an hour a month doing this than many hours trying to play catch-up for months worth (or even a year) of pictures.