In today’s age of visual culture, the camera has become an indispensable part of everyone’s life. The inclusion of a camera in modern communication devices such as Smartphones has led to a massive increase in photo creation. In most cases, the digital photo library lacks any structure, making it difficult to find the exact picture you have taken on a particular event. The solution to this problem is sorting your digital photo library. Below are some quick tips on how go about this:

1. Setting your camera to the correct date and time

Modern cameras are capable of tagging photos with the correct date and time. This feature can be very useful to enable you to search and chronologically arrange your pictures in separate folders.

2. Deleting junk images

You should make a habit of deleting junk images and store only favourite pictures, it is best to do this as soon as you take the pictures. This way you can free valuable hard drive space and also remove clutter.  It will also reduce the cost of taking backups of your digital photo library on optical media. The best way to get rid of junk images is deleting them in the camera itself before importing any batch of images to the computer.

3. Using sub-folders

Don’t import and dump all images from your camera into one folder on your computer. Make a habit of creating sub-folders and then importing the pictures from your camera into these folders. A common method of storing images is creating folders for every year such as 2012, 2013, 2014. In these folders, you can create more sub-folders and names them as per event such as Christy’s marriage, Alan’s Birthday, Wedding Anniversary and so on. Also, do not save images to the My Pictures in Windows as its default location is C drive. In case, your C drive is corrupted, becomes inaccessible or you have to reinstall Windows OS, you will lose your all images stored in My Pictures folder located on C drive.

4. Using image management software to tag photos

Using image management software is the best way to organize and access your digital image library. One of the advantages of using image management software is you are not required to independently go to the folder to view a particular image. The image management software scans all directories that you specify and arranges images as per tags or folders. Besides image management software like Picasa has several image management tools that allow you to tweak pictures. Picasa also allows you to store/backup images online. When you use image management software like Picasa, your entire digital photo library is accessible through one user interface.

5. Taking regular backups of your digital image library

External drives have become less expensive and you can store a backup of your entire digital photo library on a portable HDD. Besides, there are several online photo sites that allow you to store images online. However, think about privacy and security factors before uploading photos onto any online photo website.

There are many more solutions to sorting, naming and backing up your digital photo library, many of these will be delved into in more detail in later articles. However, the tips above are a good starting point for getting your libraries in some sort of order.