Photo Organizing - Part 2 Organize Simply

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today's video is the 2nd of a four part series where I share my tools and processes for organizing and accessing photos.  In the first video, I covered pruning and centralizing quarterly onto my PC.  In this video, I'll talk about how I organize simply. 

I know myself well enough to know that whatever organization system I adopted better be simple or I would have a hard time sticking with it for the long term. What that means to me is, I can't have a bunch of nesting folders with designations that won't make sense in the future. I'll throw my mom under the bus and give her complicated organizational schema as an example.  She came up with (what I consider to be) somewhat arbitrary top level groupings (family, friends, grandkids, church).  Then under these files, she has folders for events that are sometimes labeled by date, but sometimes just thrown in willy nilly. Some have subfolders, some don't. You can see the problem here. In order to keep up with this system, you basically have to examine each picture and then make decisions about what folder to put each in.  Sometimes you might have folders that contain only a couple of photos.  Sometimes you might have a picture which belongs in several folders, so you have a decision to make. Or you have to duplicate the photo which takes additional space.  Um, no - that wasn't going to work for me. 

So, here is what I do. My organization is based on date. Right within the My Pictures folder on my PC, I have top level folders for each year. Within each of these, are four subfolders for each quarter of the year. Quarter 1 is Jan-Mar, Quarter 2 is Apr-Jun and so forth. Occasionally, I'll have a big project or trip or event that warrants its own folder within the year, but this is limited to one or two per year and I make sure to date stamp those, like this one "2017 Japan Trip".  So, here is what my folders looks like.  Tidy, right?  Okay, let's go through the pluses and minuses:

• Pros - It's super easy to organize and requires no thought. The rules are already in place based on the date the photo was taken. Plus, since I can sort files on my PC based on date/time, that means I can bulk move photos by dragging and dropping.  I don't need to painstakingly open each photo since I can make decisions entirely by date stamp. I do allow for some events/projects/trips to have their own folders. Particularly if it doesn't make sense to intermingle those photos with my chronological ones. For example, I had a folder that contained all of the photos from the massive renovation of our kitchen a couple of years ago. That was a specific project and I also had photos of other kitchens and ideas, so it made sense to segregate them. But again, only one (or at most two) special folders a year -- everything else goes into the quarterly folders. 
• Cons - the main criticism of this system is -- how do I find things?  Most folks make a bunch of nested folders so that they can find things later. Photos of just their kids together, photos of graduation, photos of beach trips by year.  I like grouping my photos too, but just not at the storage level. Later on, we will talk about how to group photos using albums or find pictures using good search terms or face and object recognition. In addition, generally speaking, most folks group photos by event. As my kids get older, it's tougher for me to remember, say which year they started kindergarten or what year we took our trip to Cancun. So, I have a cross reference note in Evernote that contains some of those events and dates. I check the note, it says we went to Cancun in August of 2012, so I can go into the folder 2012 Q3 to find those photos. 

Another question is -- what is the point of quarterly folders?  Why don't you just throw them all in one big folder and sort them chronologically? The answer for me is the the top level years and quarterly subfolders act as a table of contents or index. Rather than having to scroll through years worth of photos to get to a something 8 years ago, I can start with the correct year and get there more quickly. 

I can generally find what I want based on my simple chronological organizing system, but remember, this is just how I physically organize and store my photos.  I use other tools to help manage, group, and access them.

So, now we've talked about pruning photos and storing them centrally (Part 1) and how they are physically organized (Part 2). Join me in Part III when I talk about using Picasa to manage and group my photos.  I really appreciate any comments you leave below and thanks for watching!