3 Best practices for Saving Photos

Photos, not unlike all other forms of digital files, should be organized as well as we can. There are lots of different ways that you can manage and keep track of your photos. I should state on the outset that if you are taking the bulk of your pictures with your smartphone, then there is quite a bit of metadata that is automatically loaded when you take a picture on your phone. That being said if you would like to find your way to sort your photos I have a couple of suggestions on ways you can organize your photos.

1) By Date – This is quite frankly one of the easiest ways to organize your photos because (especially with the date metadata from your phone) you can easily separate which pictures were taken this year vs the ones that were taken two or three years ago. I say that this is the easiest way to go because with people taking their pictures on their phones (as I said) have the year marked on them on the phone which you can see already. So you’ve now got your photos sorted by year, and what I would recommend if you want to keep with the date format is to the sort them by month. Here’s where you have to do a bit of creative naming here. Because of how computers work if you were to name your files “January, February, March, etc.” then they would be in the wrong order. This is because computers sort things alphabetically so the order would be “April, August, February etc.”

The way to avoid this confusion is to put a number in front of the month. Specifically, I would have your month folders named “01 – January, 02 – February, 03 March etc.” The reason for the zero in front of the single numbers is because in computer terms, “0” comes before “1”. So in this case if you were to just put a 1 in front of January, you would find your files showing up as 1 – January, 10 – October, 11 – November, 12 – December, 2 February. It Doesn’t recognize 10 as ten; it sees 10 as one-zero. Doing this will make sure that your months are not in a weird order.

2) By Event – We all do things throughout the year. We celebrate new years, have valentines day things, go for March Break, Have a summer vacation, do Halloween stuff etc. if you find that most of your pictures come up from the various events in your life, then that’s how you can sort them, by the events in your life. I would still recommend filing your pictures by year in some way so that you know which event’s happened in each year, but other that than that you can order your events however you like. By importance to you, by the order that they came up in the year, or by merely the event’s names if it’s a regular event.

3) By Person – Another way that you can organize your photos is to organize them by who is in the photo itself. I find this method particularly useful as I take pictures of my wife and my Kids every once and a while because they are doing something that I feel is worth capturing. I have this as a way to save photos because it doesn’t necessarily need to be an event, It can just be a picture that you took of one of your friends and family.

The beauty about filing photos by Person is that you don’t have to use this system exclusively. This way of organizing your photos is the best use in conjunction with the first two. Firstly because when you organize by date having a subcategory of peoples names makes it easier to find photos of specific people if you need it. Secondly, when you organize by event, it’s easier to organize photos that are not event specific into categories by Person.

Keeping your files organized is essential, and one of the records that we have the most of is our Pictures. Making sure that they are well organized is something that you should pay attention to. Like all the other organizing you do (or probably do) it’s important to find the time to do it. The reason you want to be able to keep your photos organized in a way that you understand is so that when you are looking back some years ago you are still able to find those photos. As a parent, I know that I will one day have a reason to get all my photos of either of my kids together and I will want to know where they all are. Your photos are a representation of your memories and of the past, and that is something that we should preserve.

Where do you keep your photos?

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