Many of us went digital without having immediately made adjustments to our methods of organization.  One of the victims of this lack of organization is our photos — many of us have hundreds or thousands of photos on our computers, all lacking organization.

I’m going to walk you through how mine are organized on my computer, but bear in mind this is just one way to do it.  If you already have a working system, do what works for you.

Prep to Organize Photos on Computer

This method will work regardless of how your camera handles photos.  However, it’s even easier if your camera already names your photo files by date and even more so if it downloads them into date-based folders.

If that’s the case, you’ll have little to no rearranging to do after the fact.  So before we get started, read your camera’s manual or check the help files for whatever computer program it uses to download your images and see if you have the ability to change the settings to do this.  (Unfortunately, I can’t get any more detailed with this part because it varies by camera, etc.)

Organize Photos Into One Folder

To begin with, we’re going to put all the photos into one folder.  Now, let me clarify!  I don’t mean that all of the individual photo files will just be dumped into one single folder.  (That would be messy!)  What I mean is that you need one single, overarching folder that will contain your photo folders, so you don’t have them scattered all over your computer.

On my computer, I’ve named this folder “Camera Pics.”  (Actually, it’s 00-CameraPics, so it will sort to the top of the folder it’s in.)  Make sure you know where you put this “top” folder.

From now on, every time you download images from your camera (or phone), you’ll put them in this same place.

Organize Photos by Date Taken

Within that “top” folder, you want to create nested folders by date.  I typically use yearly folders, which contain monthly folders, and don’t go any deeper unless I have a particular individual event with an unusually large number of photos.  In that case, I might give that event its own subfolder.

Name your files by year, then month, then day (and then any suffix), and then they will naturally sort by date.  Like this:

2016-03-28

Do the same with the folders.  So last year should be one folder called “2018”  (or “2018 Photos” or whatever  you prefer — but try to keep the date first).

That will contain folders called “2018-01,” “2018-02,” “2018-03,” etc.  Each monthly folder should contain all the images taken that month, and if you’ve named them as suggested, they’ll all be in order.

You’ll see here that I have a couple of “specialty” folders.  I sort my blog photos the same way as my “regular” photos, but I keep them in a separate set of sub-folders.  That way I’m not digging through product images to find a photo of my daughter’s first tooth or vice versa.  “Colors” is a bit harder to explain, but it’s a similar type of project with a large number of photos that are irrelevant to the rest of my life.

I’ve found it easiest to wait until a given month is completely over, and then move all of the month’s images into their appropriate folder, rather than doing it piecemeal throughout the month.

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For me, this has been the easiest way to organize my photos without over-organizing them and driving myself crazy.  It also makes the digital photos easier to back up, because it’s simple to just copy a folder onto a thumb drive or external hard drive.  (For a SUPER-easy backup option, try Picture Keeper. Use code PICKEEP30 to save 30% at PictureKeeper.com.)

There’s one other tool that’s been very helpful for me in terms of working with my digital photos — a photo inventory.  Stay tuned, because in a few days I’m going to share how I created my photo inventory.