Welcome to another edition of Let’s Talk Photography! With a show of hands, how many of you took my advice and started moving your pictures off your camera and onto your computer? Hmm, I’m not seeing very many hands. I know there are two different people out there when it comes to this topic, those who are comfortable with their computers and have been doing this all along and those who are intimidated by the whole process and would rather just carry their photos around with them on their camera or phone. Whichever group you fall into, it’s okay. I’m going to try to take the intimidation out of it and help those who aren’t overwhelmed put together a plan that may enhance the experience.

When you’re moving your photos off your camera or phone, you’re accomplishing two tasks: preserving your memories and freeing up space on the camera’s memory to take more photos and videos. However, by simply dumping everything onto your computer without taking into account organization, you’re creating a problem down the road that you haven’t quite run into as of yet. That problem is making sense of the pile of photos that are now filling up your computer. Imagine taking all the shoeboxes of printed photos and just dumping them out on the floor then trying to find that one photo you took of your favorite moment in life. Yeah, it’s just like that. If you don’t organize the photos into a logical hierarchy, then searching for photos is going to be incredibly challenging.

When your camera creates an image file it names it with a very unique and logical name that makes perfect sense, right? Something like “DSC009845.jpg” makes it so easy when you’re looking for little Johnny blowing out the candle on his second birthday cake, doesn’t it? This is part of the reason why it’s critical that you figure out a logical way of storing your files so you can easily find the ones you want.

To put together a storage plan, let’s go back to those shoeboxes. If you had that pile of photos on the floor and you wanted to get them organized, what would be the first logical step? Okay, I can already see the smoke coming out of your ears. One convenient feature of digital photos is that they have the date that the images were created stamped into their DNA. If you could automatically see the date of every picture on the floor, that would create a much easier scenario, so let’s run with it. In my world, I like to start by creating a hierarchy based on date and time. Using our shoebox idea, start with large totes and label them by year. Inside each tote, put a box for every month. The rest is pretty clear depending on how deep down you want to go with days and time. This is how I create my folder structure on my computer. Some people like to use the seasons between the year and month. Others will include events that happen every year like birthdays and holidays. Whatever makes it easy for you is the right way to organize your folders.

So, let’s jump out of the shoeboxes and into your computer. When I copy files to my computer I always put them in one folder called “Pictures” and then I name the folders with this dating scheme. When I use the software that moves the photos from the camera to the computer it will either ask me what folder to put them into or it will give me default choices that will create and name the folders for me based on a template like date and time format or something custom to my liking. I don’t like click through many levels of folders when I’m looking for photos so, instead of having a folder named 2016 and inside of that a folder named August and inside of that a folder named 21, I will instead name my folders like this: 2016-08-21. There’s a reason for the order being backwards from what we typically recognize as a date. Your computer will always try to present your data to you in some sort of logical sort order and the most common is alphabetical order. By naming the folders like this, I will always have them sorted by year then month then date. In this case, I know that the folder 2016-08-21 has all the photos taken on my birthday this year. Whether I’m using the built in file explorer or one of the many photo editing programs that I have on my computer, I can always quickly locate the photos that happened on any given day.

What if I want to have folders like “Summer 2016 – Chad’s Birthday”? That would be a great way to find photos for that day, but what about the day after and the day before the birthday? Would you have named those “Summer 2016 – Day Before Chad’s Birthday”? If you used date and time for all the folders that don’t occur on an event and then folders named after events, would they show up in a logical sort order like alphabetical? This is why you have to pre-plan and find a strategy that will work with how you are comfortable.

Once you have your folders in place and you start moving your photos into them, how can you find important events without knowing the date? We’ll look at that in the next article.

Until then, happy shooting!

Is there a topic that you’d like to learn more about? Send feedback, share your photos, or offer topic suggestions to talkphotos@ecklof.com. If you’re looking for a place to connect with local photographers in Chautauqua County, search for the group “Shoot ‘n Share Chautauqua” on Facebook.