Sort My Pictures

Sorting Picture Files

Using an Effective Filing System

Release : 13 July 2010

Field : Organisational Behaviour

Focus : Optimised Business Systems Process

Introduction

With the advent of digital cameras gone are the days of expensive film processing, for all but avid photography fans anyway.

Cheap harddrive storage means that our collections of photos has expanded beyond what could have been imagined only a few years ago.  Take a look at the average computer these days and it is not uncommon to find literally thousands of photo jpeg files lumped in the digital equivalent of a photo shoebox.

Sorting photos can be a time consuming process however it affords a unique opportunity to develop several organisational skills that are highly employable.

My Pictures

The default standard place to store your pictures on a MS Windows computer is the My Pictures folder.

Most digital cameras also come with software to download photos from a memory card or directly from the camera.  Tuning a couple of settings before downloading your pictures can make a big difference to sifting through them months or years later.

Software Settings

There are so many packages available for the plethora of digital cameras on the market that it is impractical to write a guide for all of them.  Besides, once you know the type of settings you are looking for the help files and online guides will show you how to do it with your camera/software combination.

The Download Location

Before hitting the Transfer Images button or Download Pictures button you want to make sure that your pictures will end up where you want them.

Copying files to the My Pictures folder is a good start however if you are taking photos for a work project or school assignment it may be better to specify a dedicated folder for that purpose.  This folder can be under the My Pictures folder or somewhere more useful.

Another common location is an external harddrive.  Copying files directly to your external storage device not only saves a significant amount of time but also helps to keep your main harddrive clean:

• Copying large amounts of files to and from your main harddrive can cause it to become fragmented and this can have an adverse effect on system performance.

The File Names

The simplest way that picture download software can help organise your photos is to rename the pictures as they are downloaded.

Typical options include setting a filename prefix, like "IMG_" followed by a numbering system.  Sometimes the number system is a simple 001, 002, 003, etc. that reflects the order the photos were taken in.

Other number systems include writing the photo shoot date into the filename as well.

The Folder Structure

As your pictures are downloaded from your camera or memory card many packages can create a set of folders to store them in.

Typical options include:

Year > Month > Day > IMG_001, IMG_002, etc.

• separate folders for the Year, Month and Day the photos were taken.

YearMonthDay > IMG_001, IMG_002, etc.

Again, setting these options before you download your pictures will make sorting them much faster.

Because of the way I use my camera, I normally use the YearMonthDay folder format.  This lumps all the photos I took on any given day into a single folder.  I generally find this works well because most of the photos taken on a single day will be from a single event, like 'a day at the beach'.

Renaming Files in Batches

A nifty utility provided by most camera manufacturers is a software tool to rename a bunch of photos with a similar name.  For example, when you are looking at the photos taken, say, on the 15th of March 2007, you may have taken a set of photos of a house you were looking at buying and spent the afternoon at the beach with the kids.  

By selecting all the photos of you and your family at the beach you could rename those photos with the prefix "Beach with Kids" and the software will automatically add the numbers 0001, 0002, or whatever format you have chosen.

Deleting Rubbish Photos

Frankly there is something about deleting photos that we have a general aversion to.  If you were the photographer it can be hard to delete that photo when you find it in your collection.

For comparison it is quite a common for a  professional photographer to find only 3 photos in  24 photos that he can use.  The rest get binned!

So what do you do?  Become ruthless!

There are some photos that even though the lighting is bad, a couple of heads are chopped off and the main subject is blurred because they were moving, that we want to keep.

Party photos are often like this.

The awful photo we have is nonetheless a reminder of that point in time where the party was in full swing, glasses were overflowing and everyone was having a good time.  There was no time to get everyone to pause a moment to compose a perfect shot.

You have to learn to be tough.  Get mean!  Don't hold back.

Learn to hit the delete button without so much as a second thought.  When you spot a photo that really isn't up to scratch delete it.

Point blank.  Gone.  Deleted.  Done!

The catch all - assuming you have a Recycle Bin that is alive and well - is that if you get too trigger happy you can always restore it for another day, where potentially it will be culled again!

As a rough guide, 20 - 30% of all photos taken on a digital camera can and should be deleted; that's about 1 in 4.

Sorting Files

With an ever increasing number of picture files on your computer it is not always practical to individually sort every photo.  A simple system that tidies your photo collection in the least amount of time is required.

Through years of refinement I have found the following method to be the most efficient use of time:

• Download new pictures to a folder called:
  
  
  
  "Pictures Fresh Download"

This folder appears after "My Pictures" when sorted alphabetically so it is easy to find and clearly indicates the folder contents.

• Select a folder with pictures to sort in it.
  e.g. 2010_03_18

If all the photos in the folder all belong together 

• rename the folder
  e.g. "Bells Beach Surf Festival"

• Then drag the entire folder to a container folder called:
  
  
  
  "My Pictures Sorted"

If the photos belong to different categories:

• Create a new sub-folder for each category
• Give the new folders suitable names
  e.g. "Festival in Berlin 2010"
  e.g. "House 4 Sale in Berlin"
• Drag and drop files onto the appropriate folder
  -  selecting multiple files to drag and drop is best
• When done, move the folders to the "My Pictures Sorted" folder

Storage Space

One last tip for storing your photos.

Many cheap point and shoot digital cameras now have very high resolutions like 7 MegaPixels and above.  This can be fabulous for large reprints of great snapshots but often all you require is a picture that looks good on your computer monitor or television screen.

For example my compact Canon PowerShot takes a 12MP image.  The files are 4000x3000 pixels which is HUGE! 

After a party, day at the beach or strolling through the local botanic gardens I may end up with a couple of hundred photos.  Each of these photos chews up about 3 1/2 megabytes on my harddrrive when stored as a compact jpeg file.

That's the equivalent of about a CD full of pictures from one day's shooting.

Out of the 200 photos I probably have 30 or 40 that are fairly decent and in reality about ten or twelve that I might one day want to reprint on real photo paper as a good enlargement.

After clicking through the pictures using the Windows Image Preview tool and ruthlessly deleting anything that isn't crystal clear I have a set of files I want to keep.

In keeping with an efficient filing system I use one more main folder to keep my best shots:

"Pictures Hi Res Categorised".

In this folder I copy only the best, highest quality photos and individually sort them into categories.  Here is a snap-shot of the categories I currently have:

Files that I may want to one day print as normal 6x4" photos don't need to be 10 or 12 megapixel images.  Without a lot of technical information the rule of thumb is 200dpi or dots per inch to get a good print.  So how many pixels is that?  

Well, about 180 pixels per inch is about right.  You actually need about 120 pixels per inch for a good print but a bit higher than this is best to retain superfine detail.  

This means you can get a good quality print on a 6x4 inch photo (15x10cm) with as little as 720x480 pixels!  

A Word of Warning!

Shrinking your happy snaps to such a small image is NOT recommended.  A good guide to follow is:

Happy Snap Image Size: 1080 x 720

This represents 180ppi or pixels per inch for a 6" x 4".

Better Quality vs Larger Storage?

To print a 7" x 5" on photo paper you need a bit higher resolution.  To make my life easier I simply scale all the photos I want to keep as happy snaps or slide-show pics in a size that I can safely enlarge to a standard 7x5 format on photo paper:

Optimal Storage Image Size: 1280 x 1024

Another thing, when you resize, simply keep the proportions of the original image and change the longest side to be 1280 pixels.

To make the job of resizing photos a cinch, after much searching, trial and error I found this fabulous free utility by FastStone.

FastStone Photo Resizer
Here's the link: FastStone Resizer

It is fast, lightweight and simple to use.  Best of all it can process all of your photos in a single go.  If you use the program you are encouraged to make a donation but that is entirely a personal decision.

Returning to our filing system discussion I use one more folder dedicated to the shrinking of photos:

"Pictures Fresh Download Processed"

FastStone Resizer can mirror the folder structure from the location your photos are in, for example 'Pictures Fresh Download' and copy the shrunk files to 'Pictures Fresh Download Processed' in using the same folder layout.

When you process your new pictures in this manner it never takes long to catch up on the back log of your photographic adventures.

That's all for today.  

Happy sorting and may your pictures never get jumbled again!

Comments and Questions Welcome