1 Photo, 2 Photo, 3 Photo, Floor: How To Organize Newly Digitized Photos

HOW TO ORGANIZE DIGITIZED FILES

If you’ve recently digitized your photos or are planning to scan them soon, one thing to consider is how you will organize them digitally. If your photos were/are already organized and grouped the way you want them to be, then great! 

When photos are organized before scanning, then the organization can easily be maintained and the folder structure can be created at the time of scanning. If your photos are not very organized before scanning (hundreds of random loose photos thrown in a shoebox), you will have your work cut out for you to make the images manageable and organized.

While there are some neurotic people, such as myself, who love to organize everything from our entire house to our sock drawer, most people don’t fit this description. 

Looking at hundreds or thousands of digital photos can be overwhelming and intimidating if you don’t know where to start. That’s why I’m here to give you a few tips to organize digitized files so you can tackle this project with minimal stress!

ACCEPT THE TASK AT HAND

The best way to limit your frustration with a monotonous project like organizing digital files is to fully understand and accept that this will be very, very time-consuming. Mentally come to terms with this and an overarching frustration throughout this project won’t exist.

To help come to terms with the time it will take to organize digital files, make a plan of attack. Do you want to work on this for an hour a day, for as many days as you need? Or would you prefer to set aside several hours and spend as much time as necessary to finish the project? I personally like to crank things out, so I would choose the latter; however, this method stresses some people out. Do what will keep you as calm as possible throughout the process! Remember you can always change your mind partway through.

The worst thing you could do in this situation is to give up when you are halfway through the process. Then it would all end up being for nothing, and you would have wasted a lot of time anyway.

If you’re unsure about how long it will take or whether you should take on the project on your own, you can always consult with a professional photo digitization company on how to organize digitized files in the most efficient way possible.

These companies have years of experience in digitizing photos, so they know exactly what software to use, how to label the images, and how to handle the entire process quickly. You might even decide that you want to hand over the entire project to them and avoid the headaches that come with it!

DECIDE HOW YOU ULTIMATELY WANT TO GROUP YOUR DIGITAL FILES

Now that you’ve decided how you want to attack this project decide how you want to group your files. Do you want to organize them by year, season, or holiday, by a family member, by age? Remember you can always create subcategories, this is just the first category you want to start with. This will help you group photos into smaller batches, making them significantly less intimidating to deal with for future groupings.

I categorize photos first by year or age range. Sometimes going back to my childhood, I don’t know exactly what year photos were taken so instead of grouping by year, I group them by an age range.

There are no hard rules when it comes to sorting your photos. Some people like to do it chronologically, while others find that it’s more important to sort by occasion or type. You can always add new tags later, but it would be easier to have a good idea beforehand, as you wouldn’t need to come back to it later when you won’t have such a fresh memory of the different photo groups. 

START MAKING FOLDERS

Make your main folders and even some subfolders. If you are grouping by year or age range, make a folder for each year or range. If you want to start adding in sub-folders, now you absolutely can.

I make folders within each year for specific holidays, events, and/or seasons depending on the photos I have. For instance, if I went on a summer vacation to Europe for my birthday in 1998, but I also had general summer photos from BBQs and play-dates, my folders would be as follows:

The big advantage of grouping the photos chronologically is that you can quickly navigate between different periods in your life and compare how similar occasions changed as the years went by.

For instance, during the holiday season, you could go through the Christmas photos from the last couple of decades with your family, looking at how every one changed, children grew up, and what you went through together as a family.

LET THE FUN BEGIN!

Now that you’ve created your folder structure, it’s time to start dragging and dropping your digital images into all of the different folders you’ve created. As you go along you may stumble across some photos that you just don’t need to look at again, like a photo of your parent’s finger covering half of the lens. Feel free to delete these along the way with any duplicates you find.

The key to figuring out how to Organize Digitized Files is to remain consistent, and carefully think about where different pictures might belong. And even though the folder system might seem restrictive, don’t worry too much about which folder to put each picture.

In the next section, we will discuss a neat way to ensure that you can find photos no matter the criteria you want to search with. 

METADATA

One of the less-known tips to organize digitized files is adding metadata to each digital picture. It can take your ability to access individual photos to a whole different level and can make finding a single photo from thousands a breeze.

Once you have gone through all of your photos you can start tagging pictures by adding metadata. This ensures that regardless of where you send a digital file, it will always be tagged with important information such as who is in the photo, when it was taken, etc.

While this does take time and patience, it will make looking through your memories a breeze and make sharing the right photos with the right people easy as pie. Plus, if you ever want to make a slideshow or collage for an event it won’t be difficult to find the perfect photos for the occasion. If you do the work now, you won’t have to do it any later!

Imagine if you want to make a special collage for your spouse or child, adding pictures of you together and various important moments in their life. You could go through each folder manually, going through the photos and picking out the ones that you like.

But if you took the time to add metadata and tags to each photo, such as who is in it and what is the occasion, you would open up a whole new realm of possibilities.

You could search by name and only see pictures with the person in them. Then, you could also add another filter, such as “vacation”, and narrow down the list even further. 

You can allow yourself to be very thorough when adding tags and metadata to photos. The more ways to segment the photos you have, the easier it will be to sort and search them.

Even if you have thousands of photos in your collection, you will always be able to find specific memories, which is one of the biggest benefits digitized photos can offer in the first place.