Digital Clutter - Organizing Digital Photos and Music

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Digital Clutter - Organizing Digital Photos and Music

(13 posts) (8 voices)

Started 2 years ago by klutzgrrl
Latest reply from Laetitia in Australia
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klutzgrrl
Member

I was wondering if anyone has any tips on organizing their digital media. I really need to go through and declutter the bad photos from my iPhotos, and there's also loads of folders in there from when I've put together an album like 'print for grandma'.

I think the best thing will be to sort them into

old photos
recent photos by year
other people's photos
work reference photos

that's all i can think of at the moment. Just broad categories so they are reasonably grouped and I can back the whole lot to disk.

I'm thinking of creating a private archive account on Flickr or something so I can have them saved online for easy access on my other computer.

Posted 2 years ago #
Another Deb
Member

My digital photos get grouped in a folder by year and then in folders by by general topics like Family, Home, School, Travel. Within those folders, I can place single photos or other folders of specific events.

An example of this three-layer folder system looks like this: Folder"2006" > Folder: "Home" > Folders: "Spring garden", "pantry remodel","Inventory" and a few loose images of a new tree planted, the cat, a sunset in the yard, etc.

I can upload pictures from the camera into the year and then sort them into topics and create folders within topics or purge as I have time.

I have also begun placing photos onto Flickr as you have mentioned. I don't want to lose pictures in case of digital decay or computer crash.

Posted 2 years ago #
sid
Member

At work we have a network drive that we store a lot of software on, but also photos of staff, documentation. But here is an example of how our paths work, hopefully you can follow.

X:\Manufacturers
X:\Manufacturers\Hewlett-Packard\Desktops\model name\[folder full of drivers]
X:\Manufacturers\Hewlett-Packard\Laptops\Model name\[Folder full of drivers]
X:\Manufacturers\Canon\Printers\Model name\[folder full of drivers]
X:\Manufacturers\Canon\Scanners\Model name\[folder full of drivers]
X:\Photos\Staff\2009\
X:\photos\staff\2010\
X:\Documentation\Network
X:\Documentation\Desktops
X:\Documentation\Warranties

As you can see, it's all about generalisation on each level, one level its basic,then more complicated by who makes what, then what model etc for our hardware.

We still have a lot of old stuff in some of these, and orphaned files. At one stage I'd like to clear it out and start again to make it well thought out and structured.

Posted 2 years ago #
nws2002
Member

Right now mine are sorted by year and the event (Christmas, Vacation to _____, etc). Of course there are always those pictures that sit on the camera forever, so "Christmas" might end up with Thanksgiving pictures too. Not the best system at all. Is there software that will allow you to tag photos with names like Facebook does? Sometimes I want to find all pictures of a particular person and end up opening up several folders and looking at the thumbnails.

iTunes does all the music sorting for me, grouping by artist, then album.

I use Carbonite for my backup. There is a program that sits in your taskbar and keeps the files on your computer synced with an offsite server somewhere in the cloud. It's about $50 a year, but I've already had to use it once when I purchased a new laptop. Made the process painless.

Posted 2 years ago #
karenmcgowan
Member

nws2002: there are several programs that can tag photos. picasa (free/pc & mac) and iphoto 2009 (mac) both have face finding features. other programs, like adobe bridge ($$/pc & mac) allow text-based tags.

i use mozy for my computer backups, but i also recently purchased a flickr pro account for uploading all my photos. i like that i can replicate my directory structure and set privacy settings so i can keep individual photos private or share them with friends and family or everyone. the pro account also allows unlimited storage and i like having my photos safely tucked away several places.

Posted 2 years ago #
klutzgrrl
Member

I'll have to look into Carbonite and Mozy.

I'm a bit suspicious of all this 'cloud computing' stuff with everything online, but it has a lot of advantages. I like things that do the syncing for you.

I started trying to put files on USB sticks, with the idea of the USB stick always having my 'working copy' but then I'd not have the stick handy and do some writing and leave it on my desktop... so I have files all over the place.

Your directory structure makes a lot of sense, sid.

I find it's important to give things logical names, once they have a name of some sort it makes it so much easier to find.

Posted 2 years ago #
klutzgrrl
Member

oh I found this on the main site. Some good ideas.

http://unclutterer.com/2008/03/13/managing-computer-file-clutter/

I like the archive idea. I've done it before with my email. I'll need to organize my iPhotos, because I want to have that done, but all the other 'stuff' on my hard drive - I can shove the whole lot onto a DVD and it's there if I need it.

Posted 2 years ago #
Laetitia in Australia
Member

I'm a Creative Memories Consultant (you can see my website address in my profile). We have a program called Memory Manager that will allow you to "tag" photos by associating them with different folders (each folder "contains" the photo but there is only one copy, so you don't chew up your hard drive with multiple copies). You can therefore find, for instance, all your photos that contain both your father and your pets by highlighting your "father" and "pet" folders (your folders are whatever you like to call them).

I have major categories such as: Activities, Annual Events, Holidays, People, Places. Under "People" I have "Family" and "Friends", with specific named folders of my family members under "Family" etc.

You can also set the date and time of the photo (including before photos were available). You can therefore set the time bar to show photos from a particular date range.

The program reminds you to back up your photos. I back up mine to an external hard drive. The photos are jpegs, so you are not restricted to using the program to display the photos or print them.

Oh, and you can also edit your photos in the program. :-)

Posted 2 years ago #
Linada
Member

I use iPhoto as well. My main organisation are keywords (aka tags). They make it relatively easy to just pull a folder together, based on various criteria.
My photos tends to languish on my camera quite a while as well, but it's quite easy to split and merge events as well.
Plus there is always a backup when i edit something. No regrets for cropping etc :)
It's all kept in one file, i back that up to my iDisk, and less often i back up the originals to humyo.

Posted 2 years ago #
HappyDogs
Member

I've been organizing my CDs and DVDs using DeliciousLibrary. The new version is quite nice, and pulled in all my iTunes stuff as well and backed it up. If you have a Mac, it's a really good value.

Posted 2 years ago #
nws2002
Member

@klutzgrrl I would be careful with the USB sticks, they are not designed for long term storage. They can be corrupted very easily if placed near a magnetic field or dropped or removed from a computer incorrectly. I once read they have a 30% failure rate with a year of use.

Posted 2 years ago #
klutzgrrl
Member

Ah good point about the USB sticks. My intention was to have the working copy on the stick, with a copy of the current edits on whatever computer I'm working on. If they fail, in theory the two computers should have the copies - but then I have to collate them somehow. It's all a bit messy.

I think what I might do is get a home network drive. That way I've got a more reliable backup, all my stuff in one place, and easy to use that to then back-up regularly to an external source.

Someone once made a comment to me about 'getting your data out of the house' - if there's a fire and everything is on your home computer and disks, you're stuffed. So using the cloud, purchasing online storage or sending a DVD-ROM to your mom or whatever is a good idea.

The Creative Memories program sounds nice, Laetitia, it would suit many readers I expect.

I'm always a bit torn about 'proprietary' programs, even iPHoto (I'm switching to a non Mac computer soon) as I like things to be in a 'standard' format so they aren't locked into one program. (Having seen many programs come and go over the years.) However good ones do make it so easy to browse, label and export.

I still have loads of unused photo albums and papers and stuff from when I tried to get into scrapbooking. Not my thing. But the Creative Memories photo organizer I have - a big black plastic box with dividers - is fantastic and I highly recommend it. Way better than shoeboxes.

Posted 2 years ago #
Laetitia in Australia
Member

klutzgrrl - Memory Manager uses little icons that look like our PowerSort Boxes as the "major" categories. One has to have a folder within the "Box" to which to assign the photos - it doesn't let you just stick a photo directly in the "Box".

Yes it's a proprietary product but it's (a) inexpensive for what it does (here in Australia we're selling them for $49 Aus. Technically, I can only sell to people in Australia, people in other countries would need to go to the Creative Memories site to find a "local" Consultant) and (b) saves everything as jpg so there's no drama about exporting photos or importing them into another program.

You can also store movie files in it. :-)

From Linada's description of iPhoto, it sounds like they have the same principle of retaining the original photo so there's no drama if you change your mind after editing the photo - you can get the original back.

Posted 2 years ago #

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