Where did I put that photo?????

Now that a majority of people are using digital cameras rather than film cameras we are seeing the cameras come out a lot more. And the cameras are not just being used more (because it is basically free to shoot photos now) but people are also taking a lot more photos. Now you can shoot and shoot and shoot and in the abundance of photos hope you get a good one of Grandma and the grandkids (or that award winning look you always thought you could do).

Well in the process of shooting so many photos you are also ending up with a problem. How to find that photo you took 9 months ago at Bob's birthday party. You have seen it I am sure.... all the photos are named something like DSC101327.jpg or some other weird name. And there is no way to find it by filename then. So now you are wading through hundreds if not thousands of those tiny thumbnails. Talk about an impossible task! Oh there is also the problem that if you just dump them all in the same folder then the computer starts having a hard time even organizing them if you sort by file date or to display all the thumbnails.

So what is the solution to this? Well the best way I have found to handle it is to get organized when you unload the photos from the camera. There are several ways to do this but over time here is what I have come up with. Under the folder I store all my photos I have created sub folders named the particular year, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and so forth. Then when I pull the photos off the camera I will put them in folders below that with the format YYYY-MM-DD subject name for the folder. So like my daughters birthday on the 13th of January went in the 2009 folder in a subfolder called 2009-1-13 Shoshannas birthday this year. The other thing I do then is to have the software I pull the photos off the camera rename the photos with the same format as the subfolder and then just add -001 on up to the photos. I still will have to look through the thumbnails... but now I know right where the proper group is and only have maybe 50 to 100 or a little more to go through and not thousands.

So give it a try the next time you unload your camera onto your computer. A lot of the software that does the transfer will make easy work of this. I use Photoshop Elements and it does a great job. The standard Windows software for transfering from camera does a good job too. If the program you use to transfer the pictures from your camera does not enable you to rename them as they come across then look for alternatives. Next post I will also tell you about a really cool utility I found for doing mass updates to file names and such.