10 STEPS FOR ORGANIZING YOUR DIGITAL MEDIA
We live in a digital era, which is great for many reasons, but it also creates a slew of problems many of us could have never foreseen 20 years ago. One of these problems is the growing number of images many of us now carry around, quite literally, in our pockets every day.
I have over 40,000 photos on my phone alone. That is a problem! How many times have you been talking to a friend about a specific photo, only to then have to sit for 10 minutes trying to find that image? The conversation is long past, and you’re stuck trying to remember where the heck that photo is in your camera roll. This is something most of us deal with on a daily basis—and it’s only going to get worse.
Part of what we do is help our clients create an organized and easily searchable digital photo library. We include images from their phones, computers, tablets, hard drives, and more. This allows them to quickly find any image within seconds. Setting up the library can take some time, but once the bulk of it is done, it will save you so much time later on… and all of your friends will be impressed with how quickly you can find the photos you reference in conversation!
So how do you organize your digital media?
1.) Buy SSD hard drives
SSD stands for solid state drives. These are more stable and faster than your standard drives and are great for backing up your images onto.
2.) Consolidate your images
The best way to start organizing your digital media is to take the images and videos from all of your devices and put them onto your SSD hard drives. During this initial import, you can start to create a folder structure on your hard drives and put the media into the proper folders where it is obvious. We recommend making folders based on the year, and then subfolders based on the months.
3.) Find a photo management software
There are many software on the market right now, and each offer different things depending on what you are looking for. We recommend finding a software you can access on both your phone and computer. Look for one that allows you to add keywords, color tags, date changes, ratings, and has an AI facial recognition software. All of these features will be useful later on.
4.) Cull your images
Now that you have everything in one place its time to go through and get rid of the photos and videos that you don’t want or no longer need. The less images you have to work with, the faster you will be able to put together your photo library. Get rid of duplicates (some photo management software can do this for you), delete the images of old receipts, restaurant menus, and random documents you took photos of and no longer need. Trash the blurry or accidental shots.
5.) Decide what makes sense for you
Everyone wants their photo libraries organized a little differently. For some people it makes the most sense to organize the images by dates. For others it makes the most sense to organize the images by event or holiday. Decide what works best for you so that you can set up your library to match that.
6.) Sort your images into the proper folders
Once you have all of your images imported into your photo management software, it is time to climb the mountain of photo organizing—put all of the images and videos into the proper folders. This will be the most difficult and time consuming part.
7.) Rate your media
For a lot of us, tagging every single image by person or event is not worth the time. We recommend going through your library and giving a 5 star rating to your favorite images. You will then only add tags to these photos since they are the most important ones.
8.) Tag by person
This is the fun part! Once you have culled your media, sorted it into the proper folders, and chose the bests, the next step is to start adding detailed information to your photos. Adding the names of the people in your images to your keywords is a good place to start. In most photo management software your keywords are searchable, so you will be able to search the name of any person you add and all of the photos that they are in will show up. Some photo management software even have AI facial recognition. This means you can teach the AI what face belongs to what name, and it will start automatically tagging all of your images by person.
9.) Tag by event, special occasion, holidays, etc.
You can get as detailed as you want here. Anything you’d like to be able to use as a search term can be added to the keywords of your images. The more detailed you are, the easier it will be to search and find your photos. Once again, some photo management software has the AI capability to auto-keyword your images with things it recognizes in the photos (such as animals, the ocean, the city, etc.).
10.) Share your photo library with friends and family
You’ve just put in all of this hard work to sort and tag your images, you should share them with your friends and family! Now that you can easily search by person or event, you can send images to the people in your life to remind them of the fun memories you shared.