Organizing Pictures on your Computer

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I finally got around to scrapbooking my 2011 photos.  I used Shutterfly and made a photo book.  Still anxiously waiting to get it in the mail.  It feels so good to be organized and to get more caught up with all my pictures.

Today, I'm going to share the super easy way I organize all my pictures on my computer.

1.  On my computer I have a folder called "My Pictures".
2.  Within in that folder, I have a sub-folder for each year (.....2010, 2011, 2012, 2013)
3.  Within each of those year sub-folders, I have it further broken down into months.

That's it.  It's really as easy as 1, 2, 3.
I've seen other people have each month broken down further into events, I don't usually do that, but have done it with our 2009 Disney vacation and our 2012 Road Trip out West, mainly because there were a ton of pictures.

I used to rename each of my photos such as (010210 which meant it was taken on Jan, 2, 2010), but that got to be very time consuming and if I took more than one picture on that day then I had to add a letter to the end and if I took more than 26 pictures on that day (which would happen for Christmas and birthdays), I was adding a1, a1a... to the end of my picture name.  This wasn't even necessary since I could easily find out when the pictures were taken by viewing the details of that picture.

Making folders is the easiest way to stay organized and it doesn't take much extra time.  At the beginning of each month and year, I just add a new folder by clicking on "File", then "New", then "Folder".  Once you have created a new folder, just rename it to the correct year or month.  Even if you  have years and years worth of photos, it is easy to organize them this way.  Just view details of the folder that has all your photos in them.  Then sort by "Date Picture Taken".  From there you can make folders for each year, and within each year create folders for each month.  Then just drag each month's worth of pictures into the correct folder.

I also try to delete unwanted pictures, although I'm not very good at that.
As a way to back things up (I don't have an external hard drive or a 'cloud' that I back up to), I just copy them to a CD/DVD or flash drive and store them in my fire proof box.

How do you organize your pictures?

Thanks for stopping by,
Christa