Organizing your digital photos

I recently taught a community enrichment program at Minnechaug Regional High School. The class met for five weeks and we covered a lot of topics from how to use all those settings on your "point and shoot" camera to photo composition. However, one thing that I wish we had spent a little more time speaking about was how to organize your digital photographs.

Back in the day, (geez, I sound like my grandfather) we all had film cameras. We would bring our roll of film to the local drugstore and have prints made. It was kind of exciting. After all, it had been about six months since we took some of those photos and we had completely forgotten what was even on that roll of film. So, then we would get back a set of prints and the negatives. If we were really organized, we might even keep all those negatives in a place that was easy to find. But, most likely, they were tossed here and there and were destined to a life of anonymity.

So here we are in the digital age with all these digital files floating around in our computers. We all have different ways of organizing information, but I'll share with you what I do.

First, I like download my photos from my camera as often as possible, especially after a family event like a birthday.
Second, I label the folder as the date, such as "032109- xxx birthday". This stands for March 21, 2009, along with the type of event.
Third, I rename all the files that were created on that date to this general number, then add a dash and image number. It would look like this:

032109-01
032109-02
032109-03, etc.

This way, I know exactly when the image was created, since the filename is typically printed on the back of photographs printed from any of the major photo processing stores. And, since the filename will always be unique using this method, I don't need to worry about duplicate names like, "christmas", or "jimmy's birthday".

As for the storage, I personally recommend getting an external hard-drive to store digital photos and videos. Having an external hard-drive frees up space on your computer's hard-drive, and, if you're really into backing up, you could store the images in both places to ensure that you will have the files if something bad should happen to one or the other.