With Spring Cleaning season upon us, we asked friend Chantale Bordonaro for some tips on how to best organize your photos and home movies. Chantale, Certified Professional Organizer, founder of Simplicity Source and LA’s Incoming Chapter President of the National Association of Professional Organizers knows her stuff – see what she suggests below.
But first, let me remind you about ScanDigital’s Spring Cleaning Special that gives you 15% off all orders placed before April 14th. Let us help you organize your photos, slides, negatives and home movies effortlessly! Use the coupon code : SpringClean09
Easy Ways to Organize Your Photos and Home Movies
By Chantale Bordonaro
Organizing digital photos and movies can rapidly become a very daunting task if you are like many of my clients and just keep them on the memory card forever! Off course, you can click away and just purchase a new memory card once the first one is full…. But remember that the idea is to enjoy those memories and to share them, right?
Here are some easy tips on how to start organizing your digital special moments:
First Step:
1- Temporary holding folder:
Every couple of weeks, download your memory card onto your computer in a temporary holding folder name “photos to sort “ on your desktop. If you have time now, start picking your favorites.
2- Keep the best ones!
Eliminate the clutter; delete the ones too dark, the ones where mom is missing her smile; be tough just like you were when you delete the papers ones. Even though digital does not take as much space, you still want to control the flow.
3- Rename your photos and movies:
Be descriptive and consistent!
4- Tag your photos with key words (or names of people in them)
Second Step:
Initial purge done! Now you want to move the photos and videos to their permanent home in My Pictures. But wait! That’s where the system really becomes important for future retrieval.
1- Create detailed subfolders:
The easiest way is to create subfolders under My Pictures. Decide on the structure based on how you would usually look for them. Would you try to look by year, by event, by location, etc? For me, I like to create names like 2009-11 Luca 3rd birthday party or 2009-01 New Year Celebrations
2- Use numbers to replace actual month
Notice the number after the month? It makes it easier then actually writing January or November, as now the folders will actually be sorted chronologically.
3- Moving time!
Once the folders are created, just moved the pictures or movies in the right one. Voila!
Couple more top tips:
1- Use Tags to mark photos that will need some touch-ups (those can be done later)
2- Don’t be afraid of using software to help you stay organize. You have plenty of free options out there from Adobe Photoshop Album, Picasa from Google, IPhoto, or IView.
3- Archive, archive, active!
Burn CD or DVD of your photos and video once you downloaded them. Schedule weekly back-up of your files on an external hard-drive. Also, you can back up your photos online on websites such as ScanDigital.com.
With couple of easy steps, you will be able to go back down memory lane with only couple of keys to push and a lot less frustration! Who knows, next, you might even start creating albums online to share with friends and family!
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