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Organizing 101: Organizing digital photos

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Organizing 101: Organizing digital photos

By
Kathleen Dore

Virtual clutter needs organizing, too! Here's a primer on keeping your files under control.

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The times they are a changin'. Three years ago I wrote about how to organize photos. Now almost everyone has a digital camera, and digital photos require entirely different methods of storage and organization. Here, we'll look at low-tech versus more sophisticated ways to sort and store images.

Your hard drive
The most basic approach to organizing digital images is to separate them into descriptively named folders (and subfolders) after downloading them to your computer. To make it easy for yourself, devise short names that trigger a memory so you don't have to open multiple files when searching for pictures. Renaming each photo instead of using the number assigned by your camera also helps. A collection could look like this:

Photographs 2006
January: New Years Day Granny's; February: Ski Mont-Tremblant; April: Easter, B's Birthday.


Having difficulty sorting images into the appropriate folder? The first step is to create a "To Be Sorted" folder, but don't let it become a virtual shoebox of unsorted images. That can easily happen because not only do we take more digital photos than traditional prints, but also because a virtual shoebox doesn't clutter up the dining room -- so out of sight, out of mind. But before you know it, you've managed to create a mountain of digital clutter. Make sure you sort your images every few months, and be realistic about how many of a certain event should be saved, then delete the rest.

And, don't forget: Always back up your files as the last step every time you download any images from your camera. Copy all the new pictures onto an external hard drive or burn them onto a CD.

Get organizing tips 'n' tricks from Canadian experts.

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