How To Organize Family Picture Files To Find Them Easily
There was a Jenna who wasn't a professional photographer - and that Jenna did not know how to organize photo files in an effective way. This is quite strange to me really, because usually I love systems and organizational tricks!(This doesn't mean that my office desk isn't a mess – implementing is sometimes much harder for a creative person than the fun of planning it.)This fall I've been printing photos quite passionately, and going through folders of randomly named photos (think DMC_00125368) was a slight headache. I had over 10,000 photos to purge, organize and rename before I could narrow them down to a solid 400 to get printed as 4x6 photos, and this was just from 2010-2011.Because I was this unorganized with my photos before I became a photographer, I thought there might be others out there who would like a better way to organize photos. So let's get to the steps!
Step 1 - Plan your system
A folder per year minimum. You can have subfolders inside those – maybe marked spring, summer and fall, or you could do a a subfolder per month, or a subfolder for each time you've taken photos if it's on a more rare occasion (April picnic, June summerhouse trip, vacations).
PS: My iPhone photos all go into one main folder labeled iPhone, so I know which photos were taken with my phone and which ones were taken with my other cameras. They are then in subfolders like Nova, inspiration, friends, hiking, beach etc.
Step 2 - Moving the photos from your camera to your laptop/computer
Import the photos into the appropriate folder/subfolder.
Step 3 - Purge!
It may seem like a huge chore, but it will save you time and sanity later if you purge photos that are doubles, blurry, boring – basically any pictures that don't make you feel something.
If you can be brutal, purge anything you feel like you'll never print. Why? Because in a few years you may not even be able to look at those digital files anymore, so purging down to the minimum will help you when it's time for step 5.
Step 4 - Rename files
(I'm using a MacBook which means I'm doing this in Finder – I don't know if the file renaming works in this way with Windows.)
So here you are, with only the best photos left in the folder you created – but the filenames don't really tell you anything about the photos.
Select the photos that you want to rename, right-click, and and click on the "rename x items" option.
Choose the "Format" option, and put in any words you'd like in the Custom Format box. In my case, I did "Iceland-July-2016-" and then the numbers will follow.
Now if I search for "Iceland 2016" in my file search, the folder as well as the photos will pop up in results.BUT – you may want to define filenames further. Let's say that you went on a road trip and have a folder named "Roadtrip Country Year", but then name the files that were from each city as "Roadtrip-CityName-Year". Narrowing down the content of the pictures helps a ton when you are looking for a specific city or theme later.If you're feeling extremely organizational, you can name each filename with further info like who is in the picture, or what they're doing. "LA-Nova-beach-day-2015" would pop up in a search whether I searched for Nova, LA, or beach, for example. I always make sure to add "Nova" to a filename if she's in the pictures – this is very helpful when I need photos of her at a specific place, like the dog park, our summer road trip, or the beach.
5. Look beyond the now
You might know that I believe in prints and photo books – so now that you have all this organized, make sure you get these pictures printed regularly. Schedule it in your calendar, or make reminders on your phone – eventually we stop looking at photos on our laptops and phones but the tangible prints are easy to remember if you see them every day. Even better – they will last way beyond the lifetime of a laptop, or a person really.