Tips For Organizing Your Digital Photos

Sometimes, it may seem like a pain to organize your photos, especially if you are one of those people, who just love storing photos to relive past memories and immortalizing them forever. The truth being, it is not possible to organize your digital photos systematically, unless you have your hands on a photo organizing software. Sometimes, you may as well end up in a situation, where your computer’s hard disk is overloaded with photographs that are exposed or even underexposed to lighting, while some photos simply seems out of focus.

Try Using Software

If you are facing problems with respect to organizing your digital photos, softwares like ACDSee 10 Photo Manager and Photoshop Album Starter Version can be real handy and if you’re not sure about its benefits, you can simply use the trial versions and see the results for yourself. One thing that you can do, in order to avoid making any confusions, would be that you should sort out the photos into folders that describe its contents. This always is a good habit to develop from the start.

You can start off by downloading the photos on your computer, but don’t forget to burn them on a CD, as that would act as your back up. If you do this, there won’t be any problems relating to overwriting of photos, which are already stored in any folder. Once you are done with the burning process, simply label the CD with the date and some keyword relating to its contents.

Deleting & Editing Bad Photos

Once you have made the back up copy of the original photos, you can simply open the original folder, where you had saved the photos and take a look at them. This will help you decide and get rid of the bad ones, especially the ones that were shot really bad. You can easily delete the photos that were shot really bad, which may include your photo without your head on it, which has happened to almost every amateur photographer. However, if you find that some photos are overexposed or underexposed, but not that much, you can simply correct those images with a software that you might have installed on your computer.

Label & Folders Structure

Labelling your photos is perhaps the best thing that you can do to avoid any confusion from being created in the future. Make sub folders that will help you identify the contents easily. You can actually structure them anyway you want, that is alphabetically, chronologically, etc. You can even create a folder according to years, for example, a folder of the pictures taken in the year 2007 and have sub folders in them stating their content like holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. You even have the option of renaming the individual photos, so that you can simply search them and view them at the ease by hitting the “Enter” button. Organizing the structure of the folders is perhaps the best thing, that you can do with respect to organizing your digital photos.

Another thing that you can do is to organize the picture logically, as soon as you download them from the camera’s memory card on to the computer. Whenever you want to download the photos, simply make use of the Windows XP Scanner and Camera Wizard to save the photos to the folder of your choice. However, if you are not one of those people, who are keen to use software to organize pictures, then all you have to do is make a folder name “Sort” or some other folder called “Temp” which is nothing but a folder that maintains and stores your pictures temporarily.

Additional Editing of Photos

This helps you to sort them at any given time you want. Now comes the interesting part, where you actually have to organize the photos with some caution. Open all the pictures from the folder and view them in the thumbnail format. Then simply go through them and tag the ones that you feel aren’t up to the mark, for example, some of them may need some cropping, some pictures may have the red eye problem, colour adjustments and other problems usually encountered with. Now, it is understood that you may feel this tagging process is nothing, but a waste of your time. But you will be surprised to know, that it hardly takes a few minutes or so, to be done with the entire thing.

Tagging Your Photos

Once you are done with the tagging process, you can simply move those pictures, which need some working up on to the “Temp” or the “Sort” folder. Then comes the process of searching for specific photos from the computer. Therefore, key wording your collection is something that you should not miss on doing. If you have any photo management softwares at your disposal, you can easily tag in the keywords with the concerned images.

These keywords may consist of anything, may it be the time, the occasion, the location, anything for that matter. The main purpose of tagging your images with keywords is that, it can come a long way with respect to time management. The only disadvantage that you are most likely to encounter in key wording is that, it could take a lot of time key wording each and every photograph. However, the aspect that you should remember here is that, this method could save you a lot of time in the long run, especially when you are searching for one specific photo and you don’t remember, where you had saved it in the first place.

Removing Unwanted Photos And Bulk Renaming Your Files

Lets understand one fact, that photos, no matter whether they are good or bad, they take a lot of space on your hard disk. So, once you are reviewing through “Temp” or the “Sort” folder, get rid of the ones that you think are not needed. This way, you are actually making more space in your hard disk, so that you can store more pictures at any given time. Then, there is the ever-popular renaming option, that even your Microsoft Windows XP can take care of without any hassles. Simply open the file containing the images, select all, right click on the first one and rename it like “Anniversary_Parents.jpg” and XP will rename the rest of the images on its own, provided of course that the file contains only your parents’ anniversary pictures and nothing else.

Then comes the finale, when it comes to organizing your photos, that is printing them. So, as soon as you are done with the organizing part on your computer, print out those photos and make separate albums for them, just as you had made those folders. Don’t forget to label those albums, because you may have to refer to your computer all the time trying to figure out, which picture goes where. You have the option of turning your digital photos into albums or you can spice it up by turning them into presentations and e-mail them to your loved ones.