How to Organize
Digital Photos

Photos are important mementos that mark key moments in our lives. If we don't have a system of organization in place to deal with photos, they can quickly get out of hand. Developing a system of organization for our digital photos ensures these memories will last a lifetime for generations to come.

To set up a system of organization for your digital photos, you'll want to do the following:

• Save photos to your computer hard drive and categorize them appropriately
• Name files descriptively to find them easily later on
• As you add new photos, be sure to organize them right away
• If you have a large number of photos, consider a computer program to help you organize them
• Make sure to back up your photos on CD or DVD in case of a hard-drive crash

It's common for people to enjoy collecting items and mementos that remind us of important people, places, and events in our lives. One of the ways that we often do this is by taking photographs of any event that we want to memorialize. Photos allow us to have a keen visual reminder of the important events and people in our lives.

These days, it's easier than ever to take and store photographs for a lifetime of memories. With the advent of technology, digital cameras are commonplace, and we can snap and store the pictures that we want faster and in greater numbers than ever before.

Even though there are many advantages of digital photos over old-fashioned rolls of film that must be developed in a photo lab, digital cameras make it easy to snap photos and then tuck them away and forget about them. We may not always have the necessary time available to organize digital photos, so our precious memories languish and may even be lost on a memory card or in some long forgotten file on our computer.

If you're tackling the task of organizing digital photos, you may find that it's not as easy as you think, especially if you've amassed a large number of photographs. This is why you may need a few helpful hints to get you going in the right direction. These tips will make it easier and faster to organize digital photos.

First, before you tackle photos stored in your camera's internal memory or on a memory card, start by organizing those that are already on your computer hard drive. Create folders to categorize them. For example, you might want to create folders for each year, and labels within those folders, like birthdays, anniversaries, kids, and so on. How you categorize them is entirely up to your preferences. Once you've done this with your existing photos, add the rest to your computer and categorize these as well.

When you name your photos within the files you've created, make sure the description is easy to understand. For example, you might call a file "Janie_10th_birthday". To find things even more easily, you can include the date of the photo in its file name.

Another important thing to remember about organizing digital photos is that your computer hard drive could, heaven forbid, crash at any time. If you haven't backed up your photos, you could be losing years of important memories. Be sure to back up your photos to CDs or DVDs as a precautionary measure to guard against hard drive failure. Make sure you label each CD with its contents for easy reference.

There are also software programs that can help you more easily organize digital photos. These programs are designed to make it easy to sort, categorize, and rename your photos.

Once you've done a complete overhaul to organize digital photos on your computer, make sure to keep them organized by immediately naming and categorizing each new photo that you save to your hard drive. Just like any organizing project, it's much easier to maintain as you go instead of letting 'clutter' build up. The time you spend up front will pay off in much more time saved and less frustration in the long run.

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