WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD

It may be because I am such a geek, but the whole idea of organizing and tagging my photos is a big area of concern for me. I've actually found myself awake in the middle of the night, thinking through the pros and cons of various issues associated with my photo archives. Yes, you should pity me.

In my defense, you should know that these things might just become really important to you someday when you've piled up a few thousand images on your hard drive and you're trying to remember where that certain special one is. You'll remember this post and say 'Wow, he was right, I should have listened to him. He was really ahead of his time." Well, maybe you won't, but this is really a valuable aspect of digital photography and worth putting some time and effort in now, before the task gets really out of hand.

But consider yourself warned: This may be a long journey.

In order to begin, you need to develop strategies for organizing and naming your files and folders and then for assigning keywords to the actual images. Once you've started using particular conventions, changing them will be difficult and time consuming, so thinking about them up front is a good idea. As a matter of efficiency, you will also want to ensure that you only 'touch' each image once, and that you automate and batch process as much of the work as possible.

If you've already got a collection of digital images, you've got an immediate decision to make: Are you going to ignore all the existing files and just start with today's pictures, or take that journey back in time? I found that starting back at the beginning was a good thing as allowed me to slowly test things out and adjust my process before getting in too far. On the flipside, going back to the beginning adds a lot of work. Confession: I am not even close to finishing with this effort, I try to tackle a few old folders every week, along with tagging all new images coming in. This way, I am gradually reducing the backlog without adding anything to it.

The next step is understanding how your photo files are organized on your computer. The software program that you use to transfer your pictures may determine how the pictures are currently stored. Some programs (KODAK EASYSHARE Software included) put your files into folders named for the date the images were transferred to the computer and/or added to the image collection and then it creates virtual 'albums' within the software application based on the date the pictures were actually taken (which it gets from the files themselves, more about that later).  This approach is okay if you're committed to that particular software application, but it can present a challenge if you want to change to another program later, and it can make finding a specific image on the harddrive difficult. Keep in mind that if you added a large group of images into your collection all at once, they'll be in different albums, but  they may all end up in one folder on the harddrive. You also need to be careful when moving or deleting the originals and creating mismatches between what's actually on your computer and what the software thinks is there.

Instead of letting the computer do all of this work for me, I prefer to transfer and organize my files into folders myself. I have a single Pictures folder, with separate folders inside for each year. Within each of those 'year' folders, I have the folders that actually contain the images. These folders are named by month and date and the overall topic of the images, or just by the topic if the pictures were taken on multiple dates spanning months. So, the pictures from a one day event (like a birthday party) are in  a folder named '08_28_bday', and all of the soccer game photos form the entire summer are in one folder named 'soccer'. If I think there are too many files in any of those folders, I create subfolders named by dates, i.e.: within 'soccer' I have '06_24_game1' and '06_30_game2', etc. When viewed in the file manager, the numbered folders automatically display in chronological order and the named folders display alphabetically below the numbered folders.

The next consideration is the actual names of the files. As you take pictures, the image files are automatically given names by the camera, different cameras use different conventions but typically it's something like DCS_###.jpg, where the ### will be numbers starting with 001, 002, etc. If the camera's numbering system ever gets reset, the next time you take pictures, you'll have duplicate file names. If these images stay in separate folders on the computer, there's no problem, but if you try to put these files into the same folder (as I mentioned above for multi-day events, etc),  you've got trouble. Another consideration is that that camera's filename doesn't tell us anything about the image. Last, but not least, renaming each file one-by-one would be incredibly time-consuming and confusing.

I did some reading on filenaming strategies and settled on this structure:

Date (YYYYMMDD)_topic (short identifier)_### (3 digit number starting at 001).format (usually .jpg)


 
Using this method, the first file within the previously mentioned folder of birthday pictures would be: 20080728_bday_001.jpg. The files automatically display in chronological order, and the date and topic in the name will help me immediately identify something about the images. I use a batch renaming tool to do this work immediately after transferring the images to the computer. I try to keep the topic part of the names short but still meaningful.

The filenames are helpful for organizing, but the tagging is really the powerful tool for sorting and finding images later. Next post,  Ill go on to tagging....

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