5,000 Digital Photo's?

 

I bet you have a million pictures just sitting on your computer at home?  Am I right? If you are like me, and you love taking pictures, you've probably accumulated enough to fill 1000's of albums.  I'll bet if you layed those albums side by side, fillled up with all your memories, they could  probably reach from here to Texas!  That's A LOT of pictures.

If you're like me, you probably have some of those photo's in folders on your computer, some labeled with titles, some with dates and some with a series of numbers that give you no clue as to what is what. Day after day you say to yourself.." THIS WEEK, I'm gonna organize all my photo's on my computer!"  And then another year goes by and you've accumulated another 1000 photo's.  Sound familiar?

Wherever you may be in the process of gaining some control of all your precious memories (or not), let's look at some things we can do today to make the process easy and once and for all, give those pictures a real home.

• First of all, choose a software program that can help you organize your photo's.  There are a number of programs to choose from, but for starters, here are a few that I think are good.  Picasa is a good free option, and iPhoto is great too.  These programs help you do some basic editting and organizing.
• Next, decide how you would like to organize your photo's.  You can group them into chronological order (by date), or alphabetically (by category), giving each folder a title (ex: Kids/Kentucky Vacation 2011/Scenary, etc.).  Or both.
• Label your photo's with a description.   Give each photo a name and date.  For instance the lable for this photo below would look like this....20110401-Miles.  That way, when the computer sorts your photo's alphabetically, they will also come up in chronological order.

• The most important tip for organizing your photo's on your computer is USE YOUR DELETE BUTTON! You may think that every picture you took has value, and perhaps they do.  But it's so much easier to manage a reasonable amount of EXCELLENT pictures, as opposed to 1000's of just O.K. shots.  Use your delete button and wipe out all those out of focus shots, duplicates and bad shots.  This will help you cut down on your snap happy clutter and you will value the ones that you keep so much more! 
• Back up your pictures!  You should have an external hardrive for your computer to backup ALL photo's (and documents).  You can save pictures to a disk, external hardrive or an online site (ex; Snapfish, Shutterfly, etc.). I actually prefer both.  My pictures are stored on my computer hardrive, backed up to my external unit, and over time, I've saved many to an online website.  Online websites also make it easy to share mulitiple photo's with your friends and family and to create fun albums and gifts for people you love.

Getting organized is a matter of time, and your memories are worth it!  Set a goal to have all your digital pictures purged, sorted, dated and named by a certain time period.  Then break down the project by weeks.  In no time, you will have created an online photo storage that is ready for the albums you want to create or the family reunions you will attend. 

Keep taking pictures!  But don't forget to take some time to manage your memories too.