Organize Your Digital Photos

August 20, 2006 — by Per Christensson

Do you have a digital camera? If you do, here's my tip of the month: Organize your photos as soon as you import them into your computer. If you don't, after a few years, you will have thousands of photos stored on your computer that are completely unorganized. This will make it exceedingly difficult to locate photos from the past and may lead to high amounts of frustration.

You see, I originally thought organizing my photos by date was enough (that's how they are automatically sorted). But after I accumulated over 5,000 pictures, it was a bit hard to find that one great picture of a yellow flower I had taken a few years ago. Now, if I had organized my pictures in albums, I could have easily located the photo in the "Flower Pictures" album within the Nature folder.

Because of this and many similar examples of hunting long and hard for certain photos during the past several months, I decided to go all the way back to 2002 and organize my photos into albums. It has been almost a month since I started the organization process, and I have now gotten through about 4000 of 5800 pictures.

While retroactively organizing my digital photos is not the most fun job I have ever done, it has been somewhat enjoyable to relive my last four years through pictures. Still, with the amount of time I have spent going back and organizing these pictures, I surely could have found other enjoyable things to do with my time. So the moral of the story is, be diligent about organizing your photos every time you import pictures from your camera. Six months or six years from now, when you need to find that one specific picture, you'll be glad you did.