Wednesday, November 5, 2014

How do you organize your digital photos?

Since we started blogging in December, 2010, one of the most popular posts has been Back Trackin' to Fort Worth (Saturday, February 5, 2011), which included this photo we took back in the mid-1960s ...


That photo was taken with, of course, a film camera. The point is that we enjoyed photography, as a hobby, well before the digital age. Back in those days it was easier to keep track of our photos ... we didn't take so many pictures ... we didn't take pictures every day ... we only had one camera at a time ... we discarded the pics that were not "keepers" ... there was a physical aspect to saved photos that invited organization.

Then, 15 years ago, in March, 1999, we purchased our first digital camera. We purchased the camera the day before a road trip that started on March 3rd, and here is a photo from that first day of digital photography ...


The photo was taken at a "scenic pull-out" along I-84 just east of Pendleton, Oregon. In those earliest digital cameras the manufacturers thought it was cool to put the date stamp right there on the photo, at least that was the default setting. So there it is ... March 3, 1999, 1:29 pm.  Since then we have taken literally thousands of digital pictures and it seems like more each year. That brings us to our current dilemma ... how to organize all those photos so we can find what we want when we want it!

We just purchased a new book by Mike Hagen, copyright 2012 ...


Thousands of Images, Now What? We will let you know if we get some new ideas from this book. In the meantime, we wonder ... How do you organize your digital photos? We are looking for some good ideas.

Thank you for stopping by John's Island.

5 comments:

  1. I take lots of pictures on hikes and make an "event" for each one. At the end of the season I combined them into one folder labeled by season and year. I also take pictures around town and organize them into a folder by year, as in "Bellingham 2014." I also love flower pictures and have a folder for them, no matter the year. Family, same way (Family 2014). Once I get too many of them to hold on my small 128GB hard drive, I transfer them by folder to a 500GB backup disk. Right now my 128GB has 50GB of photos on it!

    Oh, and I also have a folder called "Old Memories" that consists of scanned print photos. Now my new iPad allows me to take pictures that are in any folder and mark it as "Favorite" and it will also appear in a separate folder. I haven't taken advantage of it much yet, but one day I will. :-)

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  2. I remember those days of having to stop to change the film in my hubby's 35mm Nikon. Before a Mediterranean cruise he purchased his first digital camera and some lenses. He tries to take a picture of a sign or something that includes a title of where we were. I pick the best of the pictures to upload into Shutterfly to make an album that tells the story, then load the rest from special trips off onto a flash drive that I can then label. I still have some photos I'd like to digitize. Ugh!

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  3. Ah yes, I remember those days of pre-digital photos. I still have boxes of prints stacked up on my bookshelves and a few photo albums too. As for my digital photos, some of the ones I'd like to save are on my blog, others are scattered on different drives, some of CDs from different trips, some lost forever through various hard drive malfunctions. If you learn some good simple tips for organizing and saving, please let us know!

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  4. I realize that I like taking the picture more than I like looking at them again. I throw most of mine away and only keep the really special ones. I just keep them by year.

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  5. I would be interested in knowing any new tricks you learn from that book. I have all my images on Adobe Photoshop CS5 and use a variety of tags to keep track of what I have.

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