How many photographs do you have that are named by the default number given to them by your digital camera? Not very helpful are they? In the cross-over from traditional photography to digital photography there is a serious learning curve when it comes to organizing and archiving your photos so they are easily available to you. The first place to start your organization is in your camera. My cute little Nikon Coolpix 4300 has a couple of options that allow me organize my photos better up front. The most important feature is making sure your camera has the date set properly. By doing this you at least have an accurate date that places your photo in time. The second option on the camera allows me to name folders and take photos in a pre-named folder. Choose a description that will have meaning for you such as Mt. Royal Station, Baltimore. The next place you can further organize your photos is in PhotoShop. Go to the File menu in PhotoShop and choose File Info. Within this dialogue box you will be able to give key words for future searching or any other narrative info you want to include as well. For example, your File Info might say, “Mt. Royal Train Station, overcast spring day.” By creating keywords and descriptions of your photos you then have access to searching for your photos in PhotoShop. This indexing system is not to many casual PhotoShop users and is part of what makes PhotoShop the best photographic digital image manipulator on the market. PhotoShop also has a contact sheet creator if you’d like to print out thumbnails of your photos on a single page. Go to the File menu and choose Automate Contact Sheet. You will then be asked to choose a folder of images to turn into a contact sheet that you can print out to preview. If you’d like you can then place these sheets in a 3-hole-punch binder and have a visual reference for your work without having to dig through your computer. Another great way to help you organize and edit your photographs is slide show softwares such as JPEG Viewer and Archer. These programs allow you to select a folder’s worth of photos and to see a virtual slide show of your images complete with numbers or info. You go through the photos and record the numbers of the “keepers” the rest are tossed in your recycling bin to save invaluable hard drive space. You can be as compulsive or as loose as you want to be with your archiving and organizational system, but ultimately the system should work for you. Perhaps the worst archiving mistake of all is to lose photographs upon the tragic loss of a hard drive by viruses, power surge, or the act of a cruel god or careless user. The best way to prevent the loss of your
photos is to burn them to CD and to keep these copies with print-outs
or indices of what is on them. Ad agencies and other professional workplaces where archiving can be critical keep extra copies of their work on CDs that are then placed into Safe Deposit boxes in a local bank. So…explore your camera and use your software to help you keep track of your photographs. After all even if you have the best photographs in the entire world, if you can’t find them they are as valuable as the change that lingers in the depths of the sofa. Good luck & good organizing! -Mary Rayme Mary Rayme lives deep in the woods of West Virginia and likes to photograph people, hunt for fossils, and watches way too much reality TV. She is a freelance graphic designer and owns a small design studio.
