Organize your pics by using your OS!
Friday, December 4th 2009 @ 3:24 PM (not yet rated)
The first place to look for tools to organize your image files is your OS! That's "operating system" in acronymous geek-speak. I'd recommend starting your image folder-tree with an OBVIOUSLY named folder on a hard-drive's "root" tree ... something like "Family_Personal_Images". Below that, I suggest naming at least one level of subfolders by date, probably starting with folders by year.
Think of FIND-ABILITY and USE-ABILITY as you plan your organizational structure! Do you have specific meaningful "bright lines" to define your images by groups? Such as "Snaps" versus "Personal/Art Images"? Maybe you want TWO folder-trees of images ... or maybe you don't. Whatever choices you make, you gotta be you!
Remember, computers like to sort by their own ways ... so, when using dates as folder or image names, use YYYY/MM/DD-type formatting. An example would be "2009_06" for images from July of 2009. Our personal folder tree is: "2009/2009-06". That's a folder for 2009, with a subfolder for July of 2009. Within that folder, we make an "Archive" folder for the original files, and if we make modified ("derivative") images of the originals, we put those in another subfolder of the "2009-06" folder.
I even re-name our personal/family images for the year, month, and individual sequence-number within that month, as in: "2009_06_032", which would be the 32nd family snap of the month of July, 2009. More to follow!
