A few days ago when I talked about how to organize your digital photos, I mentioned making an inventory of those photos. Often I know I have a given photo, but I’m not certain when I took it. Time passes more quickly than it seems, and sometimes I can be off by a year in my guesses.
This means that I can easily spend hours clicking through folders and sub-folders to find a photo I already know I have. Making a photo inventory has cut this down to a couple minutes, max. Now, I did this for over a decade’s worth of photos all at once, and it was tedious. It’s much easier to start the inventory early and maintain it month by month!
How to Inventory Photos
I chose to use a spreadsheet for my photos, because it allows me to use one sheet per year but keep them all together in one file. (I’ll share the template later in this post.) If you’re not comfortable with spreadsheets, though, you can do the same thing with a simple text file and just save each year’s file in the same folder with the photos.
What we’re wanting to do is make a note of what photos are in each folder, not of every individual photo. The goal is not to be obsessive about the images, but to summarize the contents of the photo folders so you can see what’s in them at a glance (or almost a glance).
I made columns for the date (two columns, which you’ll see later), a description, notes, and printing notes. These are what I’d consider the basics. I also have a few columns that are specific to blogging, business, etc. to help keep my family photos and business-usage photos separate, but the average user won’t need those. If you have similar projects, add those. In use, the spreadsheet looks like this:
Photo Inventory Details – Dates
First of all, note that there’s one sheet per year, and the year is the sheet title.
The first two columns are the dates. Using two columns like this just makes it easier to skim. In the first column, I type the name of the month on only the first line that is from that month. In the second column I type the full date, which is also the name of the folder the photos are in on my computer.
Photo Inventory Details – Descriptions
The third column contains brief descriptions of the photos. You want these to be short and sweet, but long enough that they differentiate between subjects and that they contain key words you would probably be looking for if you were trying to find the photos.
For instance, it is minimally useful for me to write “Shoshannah.” I have hundreds of photos of Shoshannah and that would leave me still having to click through dozens of folders to find what I need. But I also don’t need descriptions like, “Shoshannah wearing a purple dress with pink polka dots and her ebooba shoes while hugging a tree in Grandma’s front yard.”
I might say something like “Shoshannah eating yogurt” or (if it’s for a blog feature of the clothing) “Shoshannah in Primary dress.” The first adds just enough description to distinguish the “eating yogurt” photos from all the other pictures of her; the second specifies what I’d probably be looking for when trying to find the picture again.
Each subject gets its own line, not each photo. There’s no science to this; it’s just whatever makes sense to you. If I have a photo of Shoshannah eating yogurt, a photo of her trying to open the door, and a photo of her pretending to read a book, I could group them all on one line (all photos of Shoshannah — one subject) or list them on three (three subjects: Shoshannah eating yogurt, etc.). In practice, I’d probably put the three on one line, but if I had eight photos of each I’d probably list them separately. It doesn’t really matter; don’t overthink it.
There is one important thing to note about these descriptions, though: don’t abbreviate. It can be tempting to use shorthand. For instance, I often call Shoshannah “Shosh,” or write her into my day planner as simply “Sh.” But if you abbreviate in your descriptions, the inventory will be harder to use later.
Photo Inventory Details – Notes
The two notes columns are somewhat optional. You’ll probably want to have them, but you’re not likely to use them for every photo. (You can also combine them if you prefer, but I thought the spreadsheet would be easier to read, for practical purposes, with them separate.)
I use the main “notes” column for additional information about an image when I feel it’s needed, or when I think I might not readily remember it later. For instance, if the photos are of Caleb’s 4th birthday, that might be all I put in the description, but the notes might specify where we held it. Images of a Christmas gathering might have a specific note if an individual was present who isn’t typically. If it’s a group shot, I might list names in the notes if I’m afraid I’ll forget them.
In other words, this column enables me to expand on the information I’ve recorded about a group of photos, while still keeping the descriptions all brief.
In the image above, you can see where I used it for another purpose, too. My previous camera didn’t name or sort my images by date, so the folders I stored them in were dated by when I downloaded them to the computer. I had to go through the file data to find the dates the photos were actually taken, and I put that in the notes so I wouldn’t have to do it again.
The purpose of the “printing notes” column is to make note of any “special instructions” to myself when I’m ready to have them printed — if I want extra copies, if I want an 8×10 of something instead of the standard 4×6, etc. You can also use this column to keep track of what has or has not already been printed.
Photo Inventory Details – Extra Columns
My final three columns are essentially specialized notes columns. The “art” column is for images I might want to consider for stock images, note cards, etc. The “blog” column is for images that go in blog posts. The “ed” column is for images that could be useful for showing my children something when we study particular topics in school. (For instance, I have some closeups of plants & insects, photos of historical reenactments, etc.)
You may not need any of these, and that’s okay. Just delete them. Or rename them to suit special projects of your own where you’d like the relevant photos to stand out from everything else.
Using the Photo Inventory
Here’s the beauty of this tool — and why we wanted to avoid abbreviating things. When you want to find a photo, open up the spreadsheet, go to “edit,” and choose “find.” Now you can do a search within the spreadsheet.
If you have multiple sheets, you’ll probably have to search each sheet, one by one, but even searching every one of my eighteen sheets takes only a minute or two (and I usually don’t have to search more than three or four).
Inventory Photos with My Spreadsheet
Leave a Reply