Many home photographers are finding themselves overloaded with many photos haphazardly scattered all over the computer and with all kinds of name. I can guarantee you the collection is only going to grow and it would be a good idea to get control of your digital image collection. Granted many organizers will find all your photos on your computer and show them to you in a calendar mode, but could you quickly gather all your photos together and burn them to DVD for a backup or to share with a friend or family?

Here are some reasons why should think about keeping your images organized:

• Faster & easier to find images
• Easier to backup your images
• Less chance of losing images

I highly recommend you start a folder & file naming convention that works for you to keep all your digital photos organized.   Organizing your images is a very personal thing and really depends on your photography habits and needs.  But I can give some suggestions on what has worked for others and you can take the ideas and create your own folder & file naming convention.  

Folder Structure:

First of all, it’s really important to keep your images together on your hard drive.   This makes backing up your images so much quicker because they are all together.   You can quickly burn a year’s worth of photos to DVD by selecting one folder.  Use the My Pictures/Pictures folder on your computer or create your own folder as your starting folder.   But don’t place all the photos here in one folder.  Start creating a folder structure to hold your images – in the physical world think file cabinet!  I think the most common structure is to start creating year folders.   Within those year folders, you have a few options.

Basic:  I would suggest creating a month folder. It’s best to use a two digit month and make sure you preface the single months with a 0, so it’s 01 for January and not 1 for January.  This will ensure they appear in the right order.  This setup can be automatically setup if you use ACDSee’s import tool. 

So your folder structure might look something like this:

• 2009
  • 01
  • 02
  • 03
  • etc.

More Advanced:  Name your folders with Month and Subject/Location/Trip/Event.  This creates a little more work when importing your photos from your camera but the end result always you to quickly find those images quicker. 

So your folder structure might look something like this:

• 2009
  • 01_NewYearsEve
  • 01_JoesParty
  • 02_SanDiegoTrip
  • etc..

Filename Structure:

Creating a filename that is meaningful and works for you is highly important.   Just using the randomly numbered file image name that your camera gives doesn’t do much for image organizing.    Plus, many times you are only looking at the text filename and don’t get the opportunity to see a thumbnail of your image when you are choosing files.   Many people don’t realize that if you use an import tool such as ACDSee that they can automatically have all their images named with a very meaningful name automatically or without very much effort.  So here are some suggestions to use in your filename:

• Date:  The most useful date is the date that camera took the photo.   Almost all  digital cameras keep the shoot date in the image file.  (This is date/time stamp stored in the image file as the EXIF date)   Your date can include just the Year, Month, Date or you can choose to include the Hour, Minute & Seconds. 
• Sequence Number:  2 – 4 digit number to make sure the filenames stay unique
• Location:  The location of where the photo was taken.
• Subject/Event/Trip/etc.:  Meaningful information to you.

Here’s some examples:

• 2009-03-01 15-10-47 - 0001.JPG  :  YYYY-MM-DD Time – Sequence#   Easy to use and names can automatically be created.  This filename has spaces and if you are sharing on web, spaces can be tricky.  So it easier to use the _ instead of the space (like the next example.)
• 20090301_SanDiegoCA_0001.JPG  :  YYYYMMDD_Location_Sequence#  Your location would have to be manually entered on import for each batch of images.  I am guessing if you high-end camera with GPS positioning features it could be done automatically. 
• Jones_20090301_0001.JPG :  YourName_YYYYMMDD_Sequence#.  Easy to use and names can automatically be created.  This is especially useful if you share a lot of photos with family/friends so you know who was the photographer.
• 20090301_0001_CaliforniaTrip.jpg  : YYYYMMDD_Sequence#_TripName.   The files would imported as a batch from one trip.  

In the next blog post in this series, we’ll show you to use ACDSee import function to do a lot of the above folder & file naming work so you do NOT have to do it manually.

Do you have a good folder or file naming convention that wasn’t covered? Please leave a comment sharing it with us & our readers.