Works-for-Me Wednesday: Organizing Digital Photographs

When I made the switch from a film camera to a digital camera about a year and a half ago, I had no idea how quickly the digital photos would take over my computer! When I didn’t have to worry about running out of film, I found myself taking 5 times the number of pictures I had taken with my film camera. In no time I had a huge mess of pictures, with no good way of finding the pictures I needed without weeding through the entire bunch. I found a couple of free programs that have helped me immensely in my quest to organize my photos: Irfanview and Picasa. When I transfer my pictures from my camera to the computer, I put them in a folder labeled “Uploaded”. Then I use Irfanview’s “Batch Rename/Conversion” feature to rename my pictures in yyyy-mm-dd-event-## format. I set up Irfanview to automatically move my pictures to the appropriate month/year folder on my computer after the pictures are renamed. I like to organize my photos by the year. Then in the individual year folders, I have sub-folders for each month. Once that is done, I load up Picasa. Picasa scans my pictures folder for any new pictures and automatically imports them. I make minor adjustments to the pictures and add keywords. The keywords I usually use are the names of the people in the picture and the event. With the keywords, I can search for pictures when I’m making a gift calendar or album. If I need a picture of Liz and Sam together, I search for “Liz Sam”, and all the pictures featuring both kids pop up. Very convenient. Once all the pictures are tweaked to my liking, I use Picasa to upload them to the photo-printing company of my choice. I use Shutterfly, but there are many great companies out there, and Picasa supports most of them. When Shutterfly offers a free-shipping promotion, I order the prints. I also use Picasa to burn CDs of my pictures every 3 months, so I have a backup. And always, always, always make sure you backup your pictures. Our computer crashed a few months ago, and we only lost a few pictures, because I had backed them all up a week before. I know I could buy a great program to edit and organize my pictures, but the free programs work for me! For more Works-for-Me tips, head over to Rocks in My Dryer! Related Tags: organizing digital photos, WFMW, photography