Do you have a ton of digital photos on your phone or maybe your computer? Can you easily find a specific photo? If so, then you most likely have them safely secured and efficiently organized and that’s great! If not, you may want to continue reading…
A few years back I wrote a blog post with tips for organizing printed photos. If you didn’t see it, you can read it here. The process used to organize printed photos is the same, however, there is a difference. Printed photos can be physically moved around, whereas digital photos cannot. They can be moved around, but digitally.
Categories come into play when sorting photos just like everything that you organize. It’s actually the first step in the organizing process. Sorting like items into categories that make sense to you may be a little tricky with digital photos since you can’t touch them.
When you create folders on your device for these categories, it allows you to easily move photos around so that you have like with like. An example of some categories could be holidays, vacations, special events, kid’s sports, kids school events, pets, etc.
Within each folder/category, sub-folders can be created to narrow down the category. For example, within the Pet folder, each pet can have their own folder with their name. This makes it a breeze when searching to find a specific photo.
Some like to organize their digital photos chronologically by the date when the photo was taken. This can be a tremendous issue trying to remember dates when organizing printed photos, but not so much with digital media. Your device has the date on the file when it was taken, not on the photo itself.
If you want to go the chronological route when labeling files of digital photos, the date can be incorporated into the file name. My suggestion for a naming convention is to put the date first by year, then month and day. Then type in a description of the photo in a few words. This will provide ease of access when searching for that particular photo.
Below are some tips to consider as you are sorting and organizing your digital photos. If you have others not mentioned here, feel free to share them in the comments box below.
- Delete any photos right after you take them that are not up to par
- Backup your device to the cloud, or adjust settings for auto-backup, or to an external hard drive on a regular basis
- Download photos and videos to your computer and create folders/categories soon after an event to prevent a backlog that could take a lot of time to sort and organize
- To avoid adding more storage to your phone, delete photos of past events after you move them to your computer
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