Now that you’ve purchased a digital camera and begun taking photos, you need to start thinking about how to store and organize those images.
My digital photos are getting out of hand. Four year’s worth now, and all in a jumble. I’d like to buy some software that will help manage all these files.” wrote Deborah W. of Benicia, California.
Digital photography seems so simple until you find yourself with a “My Pictures” folder on your computer filled with hundreds, possibly thousands, of photos and no way to locate a single specific photo that you’d like to print and send to your friends and family. What to do?
The Problems ~
This isn’t just a single problem, of course. Nothing could be so easy. Our problems are these:
- Too many photos
- Obscure, uninformative file and folder names
- Potential loss of images
We have too many photos for several reasons. First, we take more digital photos than we ever took when using film because the cost is no longer a factor. Your raw footage has more than doubled if you’re like most of us. Secondly, we don’t usually delete bad or unnecessary photos. It’s emotionally difficult to delete a photo and there’s always justification for keeping it. And, finally, we’ve uploaded the photos more than once, renaming the files and placing them in different folders.
File names don’t make sense to most of us. Your camera names your photos with a series of numbers that may not make sense to you if you never selected a setting other than “default.” Your uploading software may offer to rename the files, but you have to make changes to the settings to take advantage of this feature.
Data loss plagues us all. For those of us who’ve experienced a computer crash, the threat of data loss is the stuff of nightmares. But loss of data doesn’t have to be the result of something as apparent as a hard-drive crash ‘n’ burn. It can creep in on “little cat feet” and steal your image files through corrupted CDs and DVDs.
Solutions ~
No one solution will provide everyone with satisfaction. That’s why there are so many software products available for sorting and organizing photos.
Deborah pled with her online friends at ClubScrapChat to help her find a good software solution for getting organized, but four years’ worth of photos may be an undertaking most of us would like to avoid. If you’re just starting out, read on for ideas to keep you from the panic felt by Deborah. If you’re like Deborah, we’ll still do our best to help you out of the quagmire.
Eliminate Problem of Too Many Photos
For the problem of too many photos, I’d never suggest that you take fewer photos. The more photos we take, the better our photography skills become, so take photos of everything, everywhere. What I will suggest, though, is that you discard photos that have no value - blurred-beyond-recognition shots, pix with your fingers displayed prominently, photos taken while your camera was in VGA mode (that aren’t intended for web use) and duplicates (how many pictures of the same giraffe do you need?).
Learn to be brutal. Review all your photos when you have enough time to really examine the picture for artistic value, lighting and framing. Try to avoid deleting shots on-the-fly because you’re running short on media space. Buy enough media cards to take all the photos you want. That gives you the opportunity to determine what made a bad shot bad and a good shot good. Then delete the ones that you wouldn’t waste the money to print.
If you’ve just uploaded the photos more than once, you’re probably well-suited to a software program that puts your photos automatically into logical file folders and compares the file data to those already uploaded and notifies you when there is a conflict. It’s also a good idea to delete the files from your media card and reformat it each time you perform an upload.
Fix File and Folder Names
Of all the problems associated with digital photography, this is the one that gets the most airtime. Once a photo is uploaded, it’s impossible to locate unless your folders and file names are well-organized in a format that you’ll remember and understand.
You can make the file names of your photos mean something to you and to a recipient. For some, that means using descriptive text. For others, it’s more meaningful to use sequential numbering, while still others prefer a numbered date format. This is a difference that can be accommodated by different software packages and, in some cases, by your camera itself.
Responses to Deborah’s plea overwhelmingly suggested using a date-format folder system. Jill Pechauer, of Illinois, organizes her folders in a folder tree similar to figure 1, while Peg Callihan suggested numbering the months to ensure that they remain in order even when Windows Explorer refreshes and alphabetizes. Several respondents, like Jackie Baum, ordered their folders chronologically but added sub-categories to identify specific events like recitals, vacations or birthdays. Peggy Schaefer uses a software program to help her rename her photos according to the event, then adds them to folders by date.
One idea to help identify photos in a folder that should appeal to scrapbookers and journal-keepers is to create a text file for each folder identifying each photo by file name and providing notes. A program that does something similar and also assists in renaming files is Picnam by Andrew Rowley. A 30-day free trial will let you decide if creating text files to help identify your pictures is something that will work for you.
If all you want is to have a software program assist you in the uploading and sorting process, there are several programs designed for just this. ClubScrapChat members Jennifer Merrill, Deborah Love and Salina Z. all recommended Google’s free program Picasa for locating images on your computer and organizing them into orderly folders. Photoshop Album was another program suggested by Yvette Patko and Staci B. and it’s often included as a trial or limited version with the purchase of a new computer. Now might be the time to remind you that your digital camera likely came with software for uploading and organizing your photos, as well.
And now that your photos are organized on your computer, it’s time to tackle the problem of data loss. Deborah’s question spurred comments from many indicating that organization should extend from the computer’s hard-drive to additional storage media and avoiding data loss was the natural evolution of the discussion.
Eliminate or Reduce Data Loss
When we took photos using film, we only had to ensure that we kept our negatives in relative safety to ensure that we could reproduce an image. Now, archiving photos takes on new challenges.
- File format
It’s important to archive your images in file formats that will be supported across software platforms and for many years, so choose a standardized format for saving your files. TIFF and BMP are good uncompressed formats that should stay around for a while (do NOT use 8-bit BMP as this is not a true-color format!) Archiving JPG files is only recommended if the original photo was saved in JPG format. Do not convert image files to JPG then archive them. While you’ll save space, the conversion will cause unwanted loss of quality.
- Storage media issues
The most common media for archiving images are currently the CD-R disc*or DVDs. As a former Sales Associate for Staples, I was constantly amazed to learn that many of our customers believed their data to be permanently and safely stored once burned to a disc when, in fact, the life of a disc can be as short as two years and as long as 100 years. Most people expect that each advance in media brings a greater level of permanence but damage can shorten the life of discs and the dyes used in manufacturing determine the disc’s life and stability. Interestingly, permanent markers were not found to inflict as much damage to discs as the adhesives in do-it-yourself labels. For detailed information about disc life determined by disc composition, read this article in Information Week by Fred Langa.
The factors determining longevity are varied, but average disc life is 5-10 years with proper care and storage. Jennifer Huedepohl of Iowa works for her local newspaper archiving their digital photos and, as a matter of course, uses expensive archival-quality discs by Delkin. It’s natural to lean toward a storage media with the longest life, but that leads to the final point.
- Archiving strategies
In my lifetime, I’ve seen the introduction of the microwave oven, cable television and personal computers, to name just a few. Since I first became interested in computers, storage media has evolved from punch cards to magnetic tape to 5.25 floppies to 3.5 floppies to CDs to DVDs to flash memory. Who, today, has a computer that will read any of the first three? or four? The point is, media evolves and the devices that read them disappear. Regardless of the method you choose to use to store your digital photographs, you’ll have to update it in ten years or less. If you don’t plan to migrate your data as technology changes, you have to plan to lose it. So, spending the extra money for a CD that lasts 100+ years may make sense if you need the peace of mind that comes with that reliability but, if cost is a factor, a medium-quality disc will perform adequately.
Deborah’s Decision ~
After sifting through all the advice, Deborah decided to download Picasa, the free program from Google, and is now, “happily organizing away!”
