SMART Phone and Photo Blog

If you’re going to collect and organize your photos digitally, there’s a couple of ways to organize them.  You can put them in folders but then you must decide if the folders will be named by date (”2009″ with “Jan” “Feb” etc underneath that) or by topic (child name, activity etc.).  This can also be a problem if you move one of the photos out of its folder, by itself it isn’t searchable.

A better way is to rename the files.  If you right click on a photo file in Windows, “rename” comes up as an option.  If you have a photo of a family member, Aunt Ethel, from 1948, at the house in San Francisco, you could rename it:  “1948_AuntEthel_family_SanFrancisco”  That way it’s searchable by ANY of those names.  Note that in Windows you can use names with spaces in them, BUT beware that if you ever put a photo on the web it’s going to work alot better if there are NO spaces.  So use _ or no space at all is that recommendation.

If you give a group of photos all the same name as a “rename” Windows will number them consecutively with the same name.  The FIRST photo though will be a blank number, the second photo will be “1″ and so on – a bit counterintuitive but still a good way to go overall.

Stop by the store and we can show you how this works, it makes a big difference to organize your photos this way.