Digital Photos--How do you organize them?

All my photos are on my laptop and a back-up secondary hard drive. As we take photos with our Iphones, our digital camera, and I scan actual photos (on paper), I organize by date and then a subject. For Example: Year folder > month folder > day folder > Subject folder (if I need to drill down that far)

2000
2001
...

2015
Under that:
2015_10 (month folder)
2015_10_01 First day of trip to Ohio
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - Train Station
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - Winery visit
2015_10_02 Second day of trip to Ohio - KOA Campground
2015_10_03 Third day of trip to Ohio

All photos can be renamed to make them understandable.

I have found doing it this way, it creates a time-line diary in photos. I try to keep them in order by date and time. It's amazing how many times I have gone back to look at something we did on a specific date.

I've been doing it this way all my life now. Now everything is digitized. I've scanned all my photos from, before the day of digital, and have them stored by date. It's fun going back exactly 1 year and see what you did on that date, or go back 2 years and see what you did on today's date. As long as you have a description in your photo file name of where you were at or what the event was, it's easy to pull up when you want to look at them again.

You can also create a spreadsheet and keep a log of your photos and then to find anything, you can sort by date, by subject, by topic, or any way you want. This takes time, but the end result is great! You're actually creating a data base of your photos. Just as long as each photo can be identified and retrieved easily, this works great!

DW and I have gotten into the habit of organizing photos by Year then by event.

We typically use blurb to create a book for significant events.

"Smithers Family Reunion 2009" "GK Visit to Seattle 2012", so on.

expensive, but allows folks to get a book if they want to.

The DW keeps a daily .docx diary as we progress through our travels and I download digital photos to my laptop. As I receive updates to the diary photos are inserted into the narrative. Once the trip is completed we will edit the entire document and convert it into a .pdf which is downloaded to a DVD.

We also keep a couple photo only files on our laptops that are organized by date and location.

The .pdf DVD is almost as good as a dusty hard copy photo album and doesn't take up nearly as much space in the rv.

We spend a lot of evenings, while on the road, reviewing previous trips when there is nothing worth watching on the boob tube!

{tpc} wrote:
I make a folder and call it "date" "xxxx"and just dump everything in there.

I put the date first because windows likes to put things in order. So if you put the name...everything is all over the place. Date first made it easier to find.

What I find sad is that we have all these photos, but rarely go back to look at them.

I do this also. and I look at them but only when I am looking for something I took a picture and want to see if I can find again. but true about never looking again at them.
randy

I make a folder and call it "date" "xxxx"and just dump everything in there. In this case it would be 2015 Alaska Canada Trip.

I put the date first because windows likes to put things in order. So if you put the name...everything is all over the place. Date first made it easier to find.

What I find sad is that we have all these photos, but rarely go back to look at them. Sometimes to show people, but its not the same like finding an old album and dusting it off. Or making it for that matter.

As for a hardcopy I think costco has a thing where you can bring them all the pictures and they make a book for you or maybe it was shutterfly or maybe both lol. My dad has done it and it comes out nice, you get to see it online how it will look prior to them making it. The one he got, the first album had one photo that was messed up in some way, so they fixed it and sent him a entire album for free and he got to keep the first one....which he then fixed himself so now he has two.

Rename them by date and time when transfering them. A good program does it automatically