Organizing Photos
 It's important to have a systematic way to organize photos in a way that they can be accessed and viewed at a later time. For professionals, it is an essential part of their business as customers often ask for reprints from earlier shoots. But even casual photographers can take tens of thousands of photos in their lifetime. Preserving these memories for generations should be a top priority for anyone who has taken irreplaceable pictures with a digital or film camera.
Ideas to Organize Printed Photos
One has many options when it comes to organizing printed photos and negatives.
- Use a photo archive box and envelope system to manage photos and negatives. Label each box with the dates the photos were taken. Organize the photos within each box by event or chronological order.
- Write down the details from individual photos in the photo archive box and record them in a separate location. Follow a labelling system that best meets your needs and stick to it. Don't make it too complicated.
- You can always scan your original printed photos using a professional photo scanning service. Once your combine the resulting digital files with more recently taken digital photos they will all become easier to manage.
- Scrapbook your photos. Use older original photos and print out recently taken digital photos. Organize them into themed or chronological scrapbooks. Create a scrapbook for each person or major family event, eg. "John's Early Years" or "Mike and Debbie's Wedding".
- To organize photos that last for generations, think in terms of long term archival photo storage. Use high quality materials and tools to preserve your photos. Don't forget to consider the physical environment. To prevent early degradation of the photo images, photo paper and negatives, cool temperatures and low humidity give the best best results.
Ideas to Organize Digital Photos
To organize digital photos you will need a computer and good quality photo organizing software. Here are some tips:
- Choose a qualtiy software program for organizing digital photos. For basic photo organization on a Mac, iPhoto is a good choice. For PCs, ACDSee is an excellent product.
- For more demanding photographers and larger photo collections, consider Aperture for Mac and Adobe LightBox for PCs.
- Meta tags are part of the jpeg data. At a minimum the camera writes the date that the original photo was taken to the meta tag. There is also information about shutter speed, aperture type, flash, and other camera data. However, you can also add additional data to the meta tag even after the photo is taken. This can even includes latitude and longitude from GPS systems.
- Most photo organizing programs allow you to assoicate keywords with each photo taken. Consider including invormation like the location the photo was taken; the people in the photo; and words or short phrases that describe the photo.
- Use descriptive filenames and folder names that help to organize the photos. Include the date and desciptive information as part of the filename.
|
