Photograph organizing is easier than you might think.

Photograph organizing is easier the earlier you start but it’s never too late to get started and the payoff is immediate.

On this page, we'll discuss photograph organizing of both digital photos and printed photos and help you avoid some common pitfalls. Click here to read more about backing up the photos on your computer.

We focus on organizing digital photos on this page so, if you want help with printed photograph organizing, read through this page first (since the same principles apply to organizing printed pictures) and then click here to read about box photo storage.

When you organize your digital photographs, the first thing you need to decide is whether or not you want to use the "My Pictures" folder, the "Shared Pictures" folder, or create your own personally-named folder within either of these two parent folders (“My Documents” or “Shared Documents”.) I highly recommend saving your photos somewhere within one of these two parent folders rather than directly off the root of the c: drive. I make this same recommendation about all of your documents, not just photograph organizing, by the way.

Once you’ve decided on the main photo folder and have created it (if need be), you’ll need to decide on the remaining folder structure. Think long-term here. The last thing you need is to change your mind about your photograph organizing structure after you’ve collected two years worth of photos so that you need to move many or all of the photos from place to place.

Some people use a simple date structure for their photograph organizing folders. With this approach, you name each folder (remember, these are subfolders to your main “Shared Pictures” or otherwise named outer folder) by the year and month. Tip: Use numeric years and months (e.g.: “200502” for Feb, 2005), even though it’s easier to read “2005Dec” or “Dec2005”. Otherwise, after a year or so, your folders will automatically be sorted in a difficult to find order, for example “Jan2004”, “Jan2005”, “Jul2004”, “Jun2004” rather than “200401”, “200406”, “200407”, “200501”. If you find yourself taking many photos each month (or on an occasional month,) you can create subfolders within these monthly folders.

The benefits to a date structure are: 1) It’s very easy to save pictures to the computer and 2) It’s simple to archive photos to CD and retrieve them later. The negative is mostly in finding pictures of a particular person or groups of people later. If you happen to remember that the photo(s) you’re looking for are from an event and you can remember about when that event took place, you’re in luck. However, if you’re looking for all the best pictures of your dear niece Shelby, for instance, you may have a harder time.

Another popular approach to photograph organizing folder structures is to use more meaningful names and to use many subfolders within subfolders. For instance, under our main “Shared Pictures” folder, we have “Friends”, “Family”, “House”, “Work”, and “Misc”. Every picture we take fits into one of these categories and generally only one (that’s an important part!) Under each of these categories, we have several more subfolders. For instance, under “Friends”, we have “Soccer”, “School”, “Neighborhood”,… Then, under “Soccer”, we have “2005Spring” and “2005Fall” and so forth. Our “Family” folder is divided into my husband’s and mine and then “2004Christmas”, “2004Easter”, “WeddingKellyAndMatt”, and so forth. Thank goodness for long filenames!!

The benefits to this hierarchical structure are: 1) When I want to find photos of specific people or events, it’s fairly easy to see which folder(s) I might need to look in. 2) It forces us to categorize each picture as we save it, which means we weed out the really bad ones that no one would ever want to print before they ever take up space on our PC.

The negatives to this approach are: 1) It forces us to categorize each picture as we save it. In fact, we’ve come up with a workaround where we save all new pictures to a folder called “New Pictures” (creative, huh?) and, periodically, when this folder starts getting too large to find things, we take the time to categorize several events worth of photos. We still get the benefit of weeding photos out but we aren’t forced to do it every time we clear our memory card. 2) It’s a little cumbersome to archive photos to CD and to label the CD’s descriptively. For instance, if we move photos to CD or DVD twice per year to clear our computer’s disk drive, we end up with two or more separate CDs to search for specific photos later. Always creating labels with sample photos and a short list of the kinds of pictures saved to it really helps!

NOTE: When I talk about archiving, this is separate from backing up. If your only copy of a photograph is on your computer and you’d be very sad if you lost it, you really need to back up your computer much more frequently than twice per year! We just archive periodically to free up space and to send backup duplicate CDs specifically of our photographs to our parents’ homes as an extra precaution. Shhhh - They think it’s a gift!

A variation of the above two approaches to photograph organizing is to combine them. Take the categorical approach as your first subfolder structure, and then use the year and month approach under it. For instance, under “Family” you would have “200502”, “200503”, and so forth. Or, of course, you could do the opposite and start with “2005”, “2004”, “2003” and then add the categories below each year.

There are other folder structures, of course, and I’d love to hear if you have any brilliant ideas for photograph organizing folder structures.