Organize & Tag Your Photos: DSD Challenge #6

Welcome to the sixth official challenge of our Digital Scrapbooking Day celebration!  For Digital Scrapbooking Day, we're offering challenges related to digital scrapbooking - which will encourage sampling various digital techniques, as well as tasks related to archiving your memories digitally. We will be posting challenges hourly, from 8am to 8pm Eastern.

Digital Scrapbooking Day Challenge #6: Organize and tag one month of photos

One of the most common "pain points" of digital photography enthusiasts and scrapbookers is keeping everything organized and accessible.  Digital cameras make it so easy to take hundreds of photos, but what do you do with them once you take them?

Use this challenge to spur you into action - using your photo editing software, organize and tag one month's photos.  It doesn't matter which month you choose - just choose one and get those memories organized. 

Some organizational tasks to tackle:

• Rename the files from the default, i.e. IMG0031, to something more specific: summercamp07-jennifer.jpg
• Decide how you want to sort your photos - chronologically, or by theme/event.  Create appropriate subfolders.  For example, if you want to sort chronologically, you may want to create a folder for September 2007 photos.  Then within that folder, you can create subfolders, i.e. First Day of School 2007, Fall Play 2007, Soccer Games Oct 2007. 
• Include dates in filenames and folder names, to make finding photos easier later on.
• If your photo editing software allows it, "tag" individual photos with keywords, i.e. soccer, birthday, green, October, Jennifer, etc.  FxFoto allows you to search and sort photos by assigned keywords or dates.
• Sort photos into their appropriate subfolder "homes".
• Once renamed, tagged, and sorted, consider backing up your photos - upload to online photo galleries, print them, and/or save to CD/DVD/external hard drive.

Katie the Scrapbook Lady points out that some of these same organizational tasks can (and should) be applied monthly to digital scrapbooking kits.  In her Monthly Memory Roundup, she suggests you:

Download, unzip, and file all kits & fonts purchased. Save a preview image of each kit and keep it in a separate file for easy browsing. Back up all new purchases to cd or dvd in case of computer crash or to maximize your hard drive space.

So open up some photo files and start tagging!

Challenge Submission Details

• Even though the challenges will be posted hourly, they don't need to be completed in an hour, nor do they need to be  completed on 11/3/07 (though you're welcome to try!) 
• Deadline for comment-entries for all challenges is 9pm Eastern 11/4/07.
• We'll do a random drawing for prize winners on 11/4.
  
• Once you have sorted and tagged your photos, leave a comment here on original challenge post to enter the prize drawing.
• Participants can enter ONCE for each drawing.

For this Challenge, we will be drawing random participants to win one of the following prizes:

• Shutterfly 8x8 photo book
• MyBook 6x8 Planner/Journal - winner's choice!
• FxFoto Creative

See a listing of all the hourly challenges here.

Comments

[Oriana Contreras]

Ok, I tag my pics like this. I have a yearly folder with montly subfolders and name the pics by event.

How can we link here something like this??? LOL

[Shannon Evans]

I have tagged and organized my pics for all of Oct pics. I also tag and organize my digital scrapbook items. I organize them by kit - color - element. It makes it really easy when I want to do a page, and everything is in one place. I use Adobe Photoshop Elements for scrapping and organizing.

[Angie Pedersen]

No link necessary, Oriana - just leave a comment, with either an organizing tip, or comment that you've organized your photos for any given month.

Thanks for entering the drawing!

[Angie Pedersen]

Thanks for entering, Shannon!

[Tanya/TiggerRD]

When I upload photos, I tag them in Photoshop Elements. It makes is a lot easier to do it in small batches when I upload rather than at the end of a month. I updated just today when I was uploading the photo of my hybrid project for an earlier challenge.

The best tip with regards to organizing is to just get started and to break it up into small chunks if you have tons of photos and haven't begun any sort of organization. It's ok to set a timer, work for just that amount of time and then stop when the timer rings so you can move on to scrapping and other activities in your life. Just keep chipping away it and before you know it, you're caught up!

[Aggie]

What I do is keep the original picture files and back them up twice to DVDs. After that, I delete whatever pictures I wont use on my main HD, do some renaming and organize. After I choose which pictures can be scrapped, I run them on a defog action and resizing action in Adobe CS2, that way when I have the time to really scrap, choosing pictures will be easy and all I have to do on them is convert them to B&W, bump the color up etc if I want to, depending on the LO I want to achieve!~

[Diane Michael]

I upload my pictures onto my desktop (first back up), copy to CD or DVD (second back up), and move to my EHD where I organize them into folders by year first, then time of year, then activities or event, and if necessary, individual's names. An example is- PICTURES 2007- SUMMER- SOCCER (Michael).
I organize my kits by store and/or designer depending on how many kits or elements I have. It might be sweetshoppe designs- lauren g., mandabean or just the designer's name- robin carlton.

[junebug]

I scrapbook chronologically. So when I upload my photos, I file them by year and then by month. Then within each month I may organize them by event especially if there are a lot of photos from an event. For example 2007/October/Halloween. I make a backup disk and copy the photos onto an external hard drive every month.

[jenn7]

Done! I do this as I download images from my camera. And I use Lightroom to help too. It has a rating system (stars) that I can rate one to five stars. For me, five stars means a photo I definitely want to scrap, pretty much as is. Four stars means several great photos that I need to figure out which ones I really want to use, etc. So it's another great sorting method for me. Then when I want to scrap a page, I go look at all my four or five star photos. Easy!

[pam]

mine are done - I group them in folders by date and label the occasion

[Caylynn]

I always give my photos meaningful names, as well as the folders. I use Picasa for organizing and viewing my photos and I find it's a great piece of software, especially since it's free!