Organising Photos

[bainbrig]

I've got all our cardboard photos scanned in, plus all the digital photos from the past 20 years, and the result of course is many hundreds (no I haven't counted them) of pics.

You'd think that being able to search on the computer would make specific pics easy to find, but it doesn't. They were named fairly intelligently, but not specifically enough for easy searching.

So new job: to subsort them into folders. I was toying with the idea of either sorting by Place (e.g. "Isle of Skye") or time (1950s).

Any suggestions? How do you sort your digital archives (if you do!)

BillB

[Prudie]

I sort mine by place and year for holidays or just the event eg Menorca 2011, Menorca 2012, Antigua 2013, Graduation, Wedding, cats etc etc. I do actually hate the way Windows 10 stores pictures.

[Buenchico]

With digital storage (on hard drives, on external media or in the cloud) being so cheap these days, I suggest creating multiple copies of some files.

For example, if you went on holiday to the Isle of Skye with your friend Percy, any photos you took of Percy during that trip can be filed both under 'Isle of Skye April 2019' and under 'Percy'. Similarly, pictures you took of the alpine pearlwort on the island can be stored under both ''Isle of Skye April 2019'' and 'Wildflowers'. Some images might best be stored within three or more folders.

It's also possible to tag each picture with relevant terms, and then search by tags, but personally I don't think that it's worth the effort.

[bainbrig]

Thanks - the idea of having multiple copies is both appealing and frightening, but I see the point!

[bhg481]

I create a new directory each year, so this year is "2019". Within that I create a new directory for each event eg,"2019-04-28 answers to bainbrig". Photos within the event are labelled "1. Bainbrig" etc OR "001. Bainbrig" if I've taken more than 100. (If you label them "1." etc then "10." will follow "1", with "2". after "9".
Search for "bainbrig" will bring up all photos and directories - the directory name giving the date.

[bainbrig]

Thanks, I'm trying out some ideas now.

One benefit of using Mac OS is that the file-name can be up to 255 characters long, but of course that doesn't help if they're badly named.

I'll see how I get on!

BB

[lebico3510]

I think you can find the answer in the articles in this section: https://buzznor.com/local/