i’ve wrapped up most of the projects i’ve been working on for other people and am finally getting around to loading all our summer vacation pictures to my computer and painfully sorting through them all.

and let’s face it : i have a problem.

*hi. my name is stacey. and i’m a {clears throat} a photo-aholic.*

think like 700-ish+ images a month of PERSONAL photos. yeah. and that’s NOT when we’re on vacation. yeah. {please, someone comment and tell me you take MORE than that per month, so lover doesn’t think i seriously do have a problem, ha!}

based on that number, you can imagine the quantity of images i took while we were away for 2 months. scads i tell you. SCADS. and they are currently EVERY. WHERE. from memory cards to an old laptop, to a new laptop, to a few scattered on my iMac from after we arrived home. they are everywhere i tell you. EVERYWHERE! gah!

lucky for me, i have an easy sorting system set up on my computer for sorting and organizing them all. before i became a professional photog, i had zero photo organization for any of my digital files. i loaded them onto my computer. the computer plopped them somewhere in my default photo folder, gave it a weird name and wa*la! files saved. notsomuch. i’d go back later looking for that ONE favorite image and have to scour through folders named : zxyh75572432-3 or 333343xfm-1. good times.

once i became a photog and started taking more and more pictures, both for clients and myself. i figured i’d better get a grip on my photo-filing tendencies before they got out of hand. i thought some of you might be interested in saving your sanity and would like to see how i save them, so here we go!

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first, i created a folder for ALL our family files on our hard drive. titling it : *our last name DATA* {i learned this trick from a friend in architecture}. this way, ALL your files, no matter what kind they are, are all stored together, and you don’t have picture files in a photo folder and docs in a doc folder, and other files scatter from here to timbuktu. save yourself the headache and store them all in one folder.

then within your *last name DATA* folder, create a *Photos* folder.

 

within your *Photos* folder, you can then add folders for each year you have pictures {i.e. folders called : *2010*2011*2012*etc.}

{a note about the *Photos* folder & yearly folders : you could easily name your *Photos* folder *2012 Photos* instead and NOT store all your photos from years past on your computer like someone i know *cough*. that way you don’t bog your computer down with years worth of photos. if i’m a photo-aholic, i also have a chronic fear of losing my pictures. i’m more comfortable knowing they are on my hard drive and two externals. see? paranoid. that’s all about to change, and i can share how i’m doing that too if your interested. the point is, you could eliminate some folders by calling your *Photos* folder, *2012 Photos* instead.}

open up *2012,* and you’ll see i have a folder for each month. it’s ESSENTIAL that you add in the corresponding numbers on each month’s folder. this way they will always, ALWAYS be in the right order. if you leave out the numbers, your computer will alphabetize them leaving april before january, and december before march, and…you get the picture. the numbers are your best. friend. like any good BFF, they make life that much simpler for you.

within each monthly folder, i have sub-folders. again, notice the numbers. this ensures they are always at the top, and i don’t have to hunt through 700 pictures to find them. the *favorites folder* houses the pictures i love, love, love and plan on editing either for our personal photo book, to print, or to blog. there are *iphone* and *iphone video* folders, and then i start breaking down by events if there were any. below you can see turbo’s birthday was in january. birthday’s = TONS of photos, so it gets it’s own folder. again, making it easier to sort through later. the rest of the images i take through out the month are dumped in the main folder.

and here you can see it all in one shot!

whew! that’s a lot of folders! 🙂 obviously, this is not the only or even the best way to organize your images. this is just what works for me, so i don’t get buried alive under a pile of digital files 🙂

easy. simple. organized {for once in my life, ha!} hope this helps!

xox,