If you’re like me, you may have taken tons and tons of digital photos with your trusty digital camera, but never took
time to organize them. It’s certainly not a good idea to have thousands of photos lying in your hard drive totally disorganized. For one thing, it’s going to be very tough to find a specific photo for viewing purposes.So what can you do to put those photos into some semblance of order? Well, this article will show you how, so read on. We’ll assume Adobe Photoshop Album is used as photo management program of choice. Step 1: Get a Good Photo Management Program The first step in organizing your precious photos is to get a good photo management program. Some people maintain that you don’t need a dedicated program to organize your photos – they prefer to use native Windows XP features to do organizing.
Personally, I think a dedicated, commercial grade program is better since they is usually more user friendly and there are a host of extra features (e.g. ability to catalog and backup your photos). Currently, my favorite program for organizing photos is Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0. You can also consider an alternative option, Ulead Photo Explorer 8.5, which is equally good. Step 2: Bring your Photos into Photoshop Album Now next thing you need to do in organization process is to import those pictures into Photoshop Album. If your pictures reside in your camera, then make sure you hook up USB cable between camera and computer. Then click on Get Photos button with Photoshop Album. If your pictures are already in your computer’s hard drive, then click on From Files and Folders in menu.
I guess it’s appropriate to introduce my folder structure for digital photos. I use a very simple folder hierarchy. In my computer’s C: drive, I have a folder called ‘Photos’. Under ‘Photos’, I have 3 subfolders.
* Raw photos * Edited photos * Unsorted photos
The ‘Raw photos’ directory stores all original versions of my pictures. This means they have been untouched by any image editing program. Assuming I had 50 photos in my collection, I’d name photos here in running order using filenames like PIC0001.jpg, PIC0002.jpg, PIC0003.jpg … PIC0050.jpg.
The ‘Edited photos’ directory will contain only edited versions of my images after perform edits like cropping, sharpening or red-eye removal. Following above example, if I only edited PIC0001.jpg and PIC0003.jpg, then only these two files would appear in this folder.
The ‘Unsorted photos’ directory is sort of a temporary area I use to store any new pictures imported from camera. After I import pictures, they may have funny names like IMG001.jpg, IMG002.jpg, etc. What I usually do is to rename them according to my convention in ‘Raw photos’ folder. In above example, I would name photos in ‘Unsorted photos’ directory as PIC0051.jpg, PIC0052.jpg, PIC0053.jpg, etc. Step 3: Tag your Photos With your pictures imported into Photoshop Album, you can begin tagging process. What’s that you ask? What’s tagging? Well, tagging is a cool concept found in photo management software. What you do is to attach descriptive text called tags (e.g. ‘Uncle Joe’, ‘Robert’s Birthday’, ‘School Play’), to each photo in your collection. When you do this, you no longer need to worry about a picture’s filename, folder or date. All need is tag that you entered.
