We have all be taking pictures on digital devices now for the past 10 years or more. What have you done with them? In the old days you might have made albums or just have them all chucked in a box jumbled up like your hard drives are! What about in another 10 years, will you ever be able to find those holiday pics from the Maldives? Will you even still have them? How many have you lost over the years…. By being organized and backing up now and your photographic history will be much, much safer.

Here we will look at the basics and see how to start with the organization of your images, there are many ways of doing this you just need to find what works for you. I am just going to try and show you the way that has been working for me for many years now.

1 Relocate all your images to one location

Firstly you need to get all of your photos into one place, unload all of those hard drives, cds, dvds, memory cards, sticks, and then search your computer hard drive for .jpgs and other photo formats to see where you have them hiding. Make a file on your computer called Photos and move them all in to there. When transferring all your photos to the one place make new folders for them and label them with something that reminds you what they are or where they were taken.

You will need to make sure you have enough space on your computer to hold all of your photos if not then invest in an external drive. The easiest way really is to have all of your pics in one place. Also bear in mind that you will need the equivalent space on another hard drive to use as a back up there is no point in doing this work then losing it soon after.

2 Sort your images in to annual folders

Now you need to sort your photos, you can sort by subject if you want but I find date is far easier and manageable for the future. Start by making folders for the Years and drag any files for that year in to them. Check inside the folders you are relocating that it is also organised and only contains that years photos.

You can sort your photos by the date they were taken easily by configuring your window to show the date the photo was created. This is as long as you have the date set correctly in your camera, if not you are in trouble and good luck.

Then divide the year up. I have many folders for events through out the year. A reasonable amount of photos for a folder is 50-250 this separates them out to manageable size chunks. The folders I label in the same as my photos always starting with the year then month then day, this means everything is automatically sorted chronologically. Like this “20160727 Day at the pool” make sure you have a sensible title for locating images later on. You can separate the date or use – but you must remain the same from the beginning so it will sort properly in the future.

3 Stick with it and BACK UP regularly

Then after this you need to stick with it. When importing your photos to your computer add them to the correct year and make a new file, just call it 20160731_ToBeSorted if you have not the time to sort them to smaller event file. But make sure you do it next time so you keep up to date.

The big and very important thing to do now and regularly is to make a backup of all your hard work now that it’s all together in a nice and orderly fashion. Use your computers back up program and make sure you do it regularly. Also it’s a good idea to check out a cloud option so you have an offsite backup in case the worst happens.

Good luck 🙂