Cataloging digital photos

[RainForestt Robert]

If you use your camera quite a bit, within a few years you end up with thousands of photos. Palms, children, travel photos, you get the, well ...... picture. I now have thousands of photos, and I find that I can't easily retrieve photos that I want. How do you organize your photos?

Robert

[Kim]

This is a great question. Right now mine are in folders organized by date with a descriptive title, for example 2008_05_15 Costa Rica. That's helpful, but sometimes there can be 400 photos in one folder, so I kind of wish I had some sort of cross-reference tool.

[joe_OC]

Hey Robert,

I use "Picassa" for cataloging my pictures. It's a free program that makes it very simple to find my pictures.

I need to get an external USB hard drive so I can offload all my digital pics on it so it would be easy to to grab in an emergency. I also back up all my photos on DVDs.

[osideterry]

Being on a Mac, I just let iPhoto store all my photos by date in the "pictures" folder in my user folder. When I post photos here I create a new folder on my desktop, and resize my edited photos down to 1024x768 pixels. Not particularly organized, but it's easy to browse through my photos in iPhoto or Adobe Bridge if I'm looking for a specific image.

[Walter John]

agree, a great question. I have quadzillions of photos and I bought an external hard drive to file them in category folders. I still have to reorganise every once in a while though.

[Neofolis]

I currently store all photo's from a particular date/event in an appropriately named folder. If I go on holiday, I may have a folder labelled Florida 2008, then sub-folders, like Disneyworld, Universal Studios, Fairchild, etc. and possibly further sub-folders, like Magical Kingdom, Epcot, and so on. Where possible, I name the photo's appropriately too, although I tend to do this more diligently with palm/plants than I do with other subject matter.

I would say the best approach is to use meta tags, so you can put various keywords, as is done with most online photo storage or photo search software, which enables you to quickly find anything relating to a specific theme, but the problem is the time required to do this. It's easy for one or two photo's, but for thousands, it's a lengthy endeavour. That said, I use this approach for music, so I should probably do the same with photo's.