Photos, photos everywhere! With easy access to today’s tech, it’s almost impossible to go five feet without seeing someone stop and take a photo whether it’s of friends, food or even themselves.
We enjoy the art of photography and the opportunity to look back at those special moments caught on camera, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we can admit that photo organization is a pain!
But it doesn’t have to be. In most cases, once you get a process setup, it becomes easy to maintain.
Chances are you’ve got hundreds of photos where some may be categorized by an event or occasion and others just filed under “miscellaneous” waiting to be reviewed. Here are some ideas on how to get it all together and setup the perfect system for organizing all your photos.
Theme It — “Girls Night Out,” “My Favorite Foods,” or “BaconCon” are all common themes for collecting photos about a particular event or experience. This makes pictures easy to find and can tell a great story about how you spent a particular day.
Publish It – Turn your best photos into coffee-table book with the help of a site like Blurb or Mixbook.
Timeline It — Take a page out of the Facebook playbook and use your photos to tell an event from beginning to end — whether it’s the Superbowl, your annual trip to the SXSW festival or the birthday of your bestie. A timeline is an opportunity to let the viewer experience what you’ve experienced and share the memories.
Map It —Virtual maps are a great way to share experiences with people who’ve been to a similar location and make new friends. Register on sites like PhotospotLand or uEncounter to highlight where you’ve been (or even where you want to go).
Road trip It — “Hit the road, Jack!” Plan a trip around the types of photos you’d like to take. This way you’ll know what you will shoot before shooting it, making organizing it that much easier. Every road trip needs a soundtrack so give yourself extra points for packing a Seagate Wireless with you on your journey, which you’ll use both to stream your favorite music and to store your thousands of new photos!
Bonus: The “Old Fashioned” Way – Some of you may be more pragmatic about organizing your photos. If that’s the case, a fast, easy solution would be to create descriptive folders, relevant tags, and custom keywords to give you easy access to your digital library.
Creating a folder called “My Pictures From June” doesn’t tell you much about what’s inside versus a folder called “Grandma’s 75th Birthday.” Then you can use keywords like “events” or “celebration” and tags like “Grandma” to make your photos easier to access whether you store them on your laptop, tablet or an external hard drive like Seagate Seven.
Photos are perfect for capturing experiences or reliving memories. But it’s hard to relive those memories if your photos are scattered across computer systems, websites and hard drives.
So do yourself a favor and get a good external hard drive, then creatively organize your photos. You’ll be glad that you did.
