How do you organise 1000+ digital photos

[SlightlyMadSpider]

Just trying to tidy up my documents....my photos are a mess. I have loads of duplicates, loads of edits (e.g. before and after red-eye reduction). Folders 'ready to print' that I printed months ago - whihc are actually duplicated in other foleders etc.

I have currently dumped every single photograph into a single folder. I am about to decrap (get rid of duplicates, before/after etc.) but still expect to be left with 800+. Then I need to sort the ones that are left.

How do you organise yours?

PS - am about to go to cook tea so will check back later but won't answer any Qs for a bit

Ta in advance for any tips though

Maybe Flickr?

It allows you to tag the photos with a number of different descriptors, so you can search on any number of different combinations.

Plus they're more secure and accessible online - you don't have to worry about the PC crashing or the house burning down.

i have downloaded picasa and use that.
I have sorted into albums of relevance where possible date first so in chronological order.

eg 1992-04-03 : Wedding
2000-04-02 : DS x Birthday

etc. sometimes i've just got miscellaneous for a period of a few months but it works quite well.

Then when u have more time you can tag your photos so you can do quick searches, eg holiday, ds, dd, etc

picasa also have the online option so you can select your album and put it online.

can be private and you invite people to look at it, or public. If public would advise selecting option so not in searches.

and US picasa (hopefully soon to come to UK picasa) have option to "locate" pic on map which should be fun to play with

I definately want them on hard drive and CD. Won't be putting them on the internet as I don't like the idea of that.

Would be nice to be able to tag them all though if thats possible on PC.....wonder if I can do it with the software that came with my camera ?

I think my temporary "misc" folders are whats sent me silly...I have loads of them which I have never sorted . And even worse those which I have sorted but have kept them as duplicates in the original Misc folder

Yes, picasa2 which is what u would download allows tagging = also allows editing of pics including red-eye/crop/etc

I just went through major process of sorting all photos on the pc - i now have 3 copies, including one set on DVD - basically an "album" is a folder.

Is an album also a classical windows folder? I like to have a subset of my photos on my screensave and I would need a windows folder to do this

I also use Picassa to manage the photos although you can use something like Photoshop to do this too. I like Picassa though as the basic enhancements (cropping, straightening, light enhancement are quicker and easier to do - I down load into PSE if more difficult fixes are required).

If you search the net you can down load a duplicate file finder which will tell you which photos are duplicates and you can delete them all in one go.

I use a purely date based folder sequence in Picassa - so photos uploaded today would be Download 010807. If I then export files to another file for printing or uploading then they will be stored as 010807a et seq.

I have around 20,000 photographs on Picassa and can always access things fairly quickly

Califrau - PMSL - you are obviously as obsessive as I am

I have mine on my hard disk - on the back up hard disk and burned on CDs of which I keep one copy at work and DH keeps one copy at his work 'just in case'!

Keeping a disk at work...hadn't thought of that