How to organize photo folders?

Organizing photos in folders is the only sane way of sorting a bunch of photos, which people click by the hour these days. The sheer volume of photos which people take with their camera phones and digital cameras is dizzying and it is important to organize them in a way which makes it easy to locate them properly.

So follow these step-by-step guide to organizing photos in folders in your laptop or computer:

1. Download all your photos from the camera phone or digital camera to your computer. Transfer them to a temporary folder till the time you are ready to add them to your gallery.

2. Discard all the bad photos, like the blurry ones, or those with bad photo compositions. Keeping these photos is of no use and they simply eat up your computer’s memory space.

3. Edit the ones that you do wish to keep. It need not be elaborate editing, just simple things like cropping and red-eye reduction touches.

4. Rename all the files with details of the picture, like Demi_birthday_New York_ Dec2011.jpg, or Class camping_Dana and Sam selfie_Nov2010.jpg. This way, the title itself gives you all the info you need. On a later date if you want to search for a particular photo, all you need to do is search by the name and the relevant files will pop up.

5. You can also add more detailed information about a photo by using popular software like Adobe Photoshop. Information like date, time, location, caption and the type of camera used, all are collectively are called Metadata.

6.       Now start bundling them in a folder which tells you about its contents as well. Like Dana Birthday 2011, or Beach trip 2012.

7. It is possible that one photo could belong to two folders. In that case, simple paste the shortcut in one folder and keep the original in the other. Like a photo can belong to “Convocation 2012” and also “College friends”.  But do remember, if you delete the original, the shortcut will be of no use.