Was one of your New Years Resolutions to become better organized in 2014? Do you take photos several days a week for your projects and recipes? If so you probably have thousands of photos or you soon will and you need to become efficient and organized. Ask anyone who has been taking photos for awhile and they will tell you how important it is to organize your photos systematically.
Here are 5 tips to help you organize your Digital Photos.
1. Download your photos at the end of each project. When you finish taking photos of your recipe, download and delete photos from your memory card before starting on another project.
2. Where should you download your photos? Find an organizing system that works for you. You are now a serious photographer so you need the software to support you organize and edit your digital photos. I use Adobe Lightroom to transfer my photos from my camera and edit in one place. Another choice is Apple’s Aperture Program, which is a pro version of iphoto. Whichever one you choose, make sure it is simple.
3. Once you have your photos downloaded and edited; label the ones you plan on keeping with the name of the project and immediately delete the ones you will not be using. Also, make sure that your date is set properly on your camera. Your date stamp is attached to your photos when you download. Having the date set will allow you to search in chronological order as well as file name.
4. Once you have edited and labeled all the photos for a project you need to upload them into a file folder. Again name it after your project, i.e. if you are a food blogger the title of your recipe or post. To go a step further organize these sub folders into a main folder for each Month/Year.
5. Now you have all these folders, where should you put them? Buy a dedicated external hard drive strictly for the use of your digital photo library. I use the G drive which was recommended to me by several professional photographers, and I am very happy with this method. You can also go the route of storing your photos in online storage sites. There are plenty to choose from; flickr, shutterfly, snapfish, cloud and dropbox to name a few.
Great tips! I have so many photos, but I do go through and delete all the time. I will look into the sites you mention. iPhoto is what I use now.
These are useful tips, since the holidays are over, its time to organize all those new photos. My husband actually introduced me to storage virtualization and I think it is such a convenient and safe way to store and back up all our computer files. Definitely gives me piece of mind knowing all my precious photos are safe should anything happen to our computer.
Just want to add another tip – Another way to upload pictures from a smartphone is to signup with online storage sites like mentioned in the post (Dropbox, flickr, etc.) and also download their apps. I used Dropbox and its iPhone app for the longest time. If you have a lot of pics, it’s not the best method though because you have to select each picture. But if you have a gmail account, you can download the Google+ app and it automatically uploads all pictures from your phone and saves them online (privately, not accessible to the public). And it continuously checks and backs up new pictures you have on your phone. You need a data plan or access to wifi for this to work.
Oh, another tip I forgot to mention! Dropbox is great but I find I run out of space very quickly. I’m now using Copy which offers 15gb at signup and you earn gb more per referral, and your referral gains the 5gb too, getting them 20gb when they sign up! I’ve converted a lot of my friends to Copy and we’ve all been super happy with the service and all the storage space!
This is my referral link if anyone wants to get the extra 5 gb when signing up – 🙂
(no I don’t work for Copy, but I do LOVE the service! I’ll probably write up a blog post it!)