With the beginning of a new year, many people take to cleaning out and organizing their homes. One often overlooked task is organizing all of our digital files. Images take up a lot of space on your computer and can easily become a chaotic mess that you spend hours trying to sift through. From images you take personally to the ones you have professionally done, keeping your digital pictures organized may seem like a daunting task. Fortunately, there are some quick and easy ways you can keep your images organized and make finding the ones you want a quick process.
Date and Time Most often you can set the date and time on your camera and this information will automatically show when you upload new images onto your computer. But, if you are uploading digital files from your professional session then you will want to make sure you add the date to the files before you begin the upload.
Name Create folders for your images with the name, date or occasion you had them taken. It is always a good idea to add in the year as well. You can create subfolders within the pictures folders on your computer for images you upload from your professional session.
Keywords It can take a little extra time to tag your images with keywords but this can make finding the images you want significantly easier. Use keywords that you will be able to remember and be consistent with them. Keywords can be single words or phrases. Some ideas for key-wording include the event, date, location, season, and people in the images.
Rate and Delete You’d be surprised how many images are on your computer that you simply will never use or feel the need to look at again. Do you have images that are out of focus, have poor exposure, or random images of your hands, feet or the inside of your bag? Spend an afternoon going through and deleting the images that are pointless to keep. While you’re at it, you can go through and rate the images as well. This will allow you to easily find the images you like the most.
Happy organizing!
