Photo organization: How Geoff does it

Photodoto reader Geoff Coupe sent in some very helpful and detailed responses to my plea for help regarding my Great Photo Organization Project (which is still proceeding although I haven’t updated the sidebar in a little while). Here are his excellent responses to my questions (and you can read more on his blog). Thanks, Geoff!

If you’ve got a great system for organizing and archiving your growing photo collection, share it in the comments or email me a guest post for publication here. Maybe we could make a regular series of it… Thanks!

Question: As soon as I tagged my second photo I realized that I need a common taxonomy for my tags. I can’t tag some photos “Bird” and others “Birds” and still others “Winged beasts.” I need to pick a definitive tag and use it for all of my photos. How do I decide? Should all tags be plural or singular? Does it matter? Also, while I’ll be the main user of the archive for now, one day my children or grandchildren will inherit my collection, so the tags will need to make sense to other people besides myself.

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De-clutter Your ‘pictures’ Folder.

As part of a Christmas present I recently found myself spending a sizable chunk of my evening searching through seemingly endless folders on my laptop trying to find photographs of a friend’s son. In the end I just downloaded the photos from my Flickr account. My computer filing system is a mess, to say the least!

For those of you out there who may be similarly organisationally-challenged here is a brief guide to a simple work flow to help prevent the image chaos I’ve ended up with. It’s going to be my New Year’s resolution to try and stop just dumping DCIM folders onto my desktop and actually implement something like this!

1. Edit as you download.This requires a little bit of brutal honesty towards your photographs. The idea is to get rid of the shots you are never going to look at again before they even begin to take up space on your desktop. Keep photos of family and friends (even the technically bad shots might prove useful for blackmail in the future!) but be selective about other shots. Ask yourself if you aready have a better shot of the same view/landmark/object.

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