What do you do with your digital photos?

[latherrinserepeat]

We have a tonne of photos now - digital cameras and now a camcorder and I don't know what do to do with them all!

We have just got a new home PC and I am putting them all on the one machine and then will do a new back up onto an external hard drive we have - so far so good.

But how do you sort them so you can find stuff - can you all tell me what you do please?

Thanks

I have a directory with the year, then a sub-directory with the month. Bigish events I tend to do another sub-directory say "Cornwall Holiday" or "Tommy's birthday" - that kind of thing.

Not a very inspiring way but it works.

Agree with Shopping, but also: have you looked at Photobox? For our main holiday each year I do one of their photobooks, which gets looked at much more than the photos on the PC. They also provide online storage/back up for your photos and you can easily share them with friends/family.

Thank you for your suggestions - a friend was only telling me this week about Photobox so will investigate! Thanks again.

Ah yes, Photobox - I did a photobook recently when it was 2 for 1 - love the idea of having an "album" on the coffee table - lots of people comment on how nice it is.

Mine are all on my PC in a folder called "All photos" - I don't bother with sub folders as I like to see all my photos at a glance and in chronological order. Then I upload my favourite ones to Flickr.com. These are the photos that I then upload to Photobox and create a hardbound printed photo album once a year.

Ours our stored in a directory system:

Camera/Year/Month

(Not sure the camera bit is strictly necessary, looking back, but now we've got years' worth done like it we ain't changing now!)

To find the photos we want we tend to use PhotoShop Elements to tag all the photos so that we can find them again :) There is a little bit of work involved in tagging the photos, but once its done its incredibly powerful - we have tags for people, animals, events, locations (+ others) so I you can then search for photos with whatever combination of tags you want applied such as:

DH
DMIL
York Minster
Dog

And it will pull out the 5 photos out of the 20,000+ in the database that have those tags applied. I can't imagine how we'd find photos without it, tbh.

Can I do a slight hijack and ask who you get to process your pictures? I don't want mine produced in an album, just loose photos (like in ye olden dayes). Can anyone recommend a good company? Do I just email them to them? How does it work? Tia.

We haven't done prints for a while, but were always pleased with PhotoBox. On the odd occasion we were disappointed with a print they did a really good job of sending us reprints promptly. You create an account and then upload photos to an album. Once there, you can choose how many prints you want, what size you want them and if you want a partial enlargement (in which case you select what bit). Once you've put all the prints you want in your shopping basket you pay, they process the order and the pictures arrive in the post.

You can also choose to share albums with others, who can then order their own prints direct (which is great for relatives).

hth :)

V helpful, thanks Tangle .

I offload ours into folders. If I offloaded today it would say "101128 Early snow".
Advantage is you can see ALL your folders at once , but they automatically sort into years & months by having the first section sortable by YYMMDD.

Then in a few years if eg I don't know if the early snow was in 2009 or 2011 I can just scan down my list of folders without having to fire up a 2009 subfolde then a 2011 subfolder, only to find it was in 2010

We have folders with either the month (if just general snaps) or the event (if a holiday, or something else that has generated loads of photos).

We have them on Itunes so backed up onto our phones (very handy when you need to show someone one of your proud snaps). We also put them onto Facebook.

With Windows 7 you can tag photos with the name of the subjects (like Facebook), so theoretically you can find all the photos that a particular person appears in. This is one of my jobs for the Christmas holidays. :)

Mine are in folders by date

Eg.

Photos > 2010 > November > 28 Nov

MmeBlueberry really? Where've they hidden that feature?

namey Bonusprint are good. Snapfish is ok too.

We print individual photos out too - we also use Photobox and love them - cheap and good.

Kaloki,

It's not exactly the same as Facebook, and it works in both Vista and Windows 7.

You go to the picture directory/folder and simply click on the pictures you want to tag, using CTRL to select multiple pictures. Then at the bottom of the screen there is a 'add a tag' command. You simply type in the tag and save.

If you are selecting names of people, you just go through your photos with that person, and tag them. The repeat the process for the next person.

When you want to sort them or pick out selected pictures, there is a tags menu at the top of the picture directory.

I've started using Blurb.com to make photobooks. I do one for major events (am currently compiling Xmas 2010) and keep one going to add to as and when which I print off once or twice a year.

excellent, thanks for that

Someone recommended picasa on here ages ago.

I love it, it sorts out the photos for you and you can group them by date and by who is in them. It lets you edit them and upload/export them to different places.

Same as most here: sub-divided by year, then month, then events (if there are lots of photos for a month).

Having had a back-log of pics for several years, we are working through editing our selections and uploading to Photobox and printing everything off. It's so cheap with Photobox it costs about a tenner per years'-worth-of-photos.