I have nearly 200,000 digital pictures...organize? NOT YET?

I don't feel so bad now. I only have about 100,000 and about half of them are organized (somewhat).

Storage media: The days of the shoe box in the closet are pretty much gone. Options for digital image storage are plentiful. USB Hard drives are nice, relatively inexpensive and compact. And if you compare the cost of one of these portable drives to the cost of how many DVD or BR it would take to store the same amount of images, you will find they are not that expensive.

You can get a drive for each, or a group of categories. For example have one for Landscape, Scenery, Skyscape, and Wildlife. Or have one for a really large subject. I have one for all the pictures I've taken of me (just kidding). Plus you can get them in various sizes and store smaller categories on them to ease over crowding drives with your more popular subjects.

If you go the drive route, I would strongly advice you to get a program that can make an image of the drive as a back up. Find one that will: burn the image straight to CD, DVD or BR (a feature called "spanning" will do this); incremental back ups (means it backs up only the files that have been added or changed since the last back up); ability to "mount" the back up image (when mounted, the image acts like an extra drive and can be accessed with any file manager type of program and image editors). Acronis is an excellent program for this.

When I say CD I mean CD, DVD or BR. Saving to CD is the next best way to back up your images. Caution here. If the CD becomes damaged... YOU'RE DONE! Just like the dog puking in the shoe box, you will loose some, most, all of the images. So when burning to CD make 2, at least. Also, everyone knows not to scratch the underside of a CD (make it hard to read). Not many people know not to damage the top side (makes it impossible to read). The top side has a thin, delicate layer of "foil" on it. That is where the data is stored. You can buff scratches out of the bottom side, but a scratch on the top "foil" side is not reparable, the data is gone. So get yourself a bunch of CD labels and put them on your CDs. Even if you don't print them out, and just write on them, this protects that foil. You can still damage the CD with labels on them, but not as easy as without.

Floppy Disks: Just wanted to scare you a little. As my (small) pictures weigh in at 1.44mb, floppy disks are a thing of the past when it comes to images.

How to store: In my experience, if you start with a program to file your images, then you are stuck with that program's way of doing things. Changing to a different program means a lot of time converting to the new system.

One scheme that I use, seems to work with everything I need. I create folders using the following format: yymmdd - topic Using the date the picture was taken with 2 digits of the year, month and day, followed by a space, a hyphen, a space and the topic. I use a space for readability and to avoid a collision when uploading to, or downloading from my website (spaces are not allowed in names). This also helps to prevent overwriting last year's pictures with this year's pictures (if your camera uses the date as part of the file name).

080704 - picnic

080704 - fireworks

081225 - christmas

090101 - party

090618 - clarklake

091225 - christmas

100101 - party

I also create some named folders to move these folders into.

christmas

clarklake

clouds

diving

dogs

landscape

wildlife

yard

These serve as general categories. Open these folders and you will find all of the other folders named by yymmdd - topic (which usually matches the name of the folder I'm in).

If some, most, all of your images files are combined in one folder, this scheme might be the best route to start with. Create folders with just the date (yymmdd). Then take the files of that date and put them in the appropriate folders. Then go through the folders and create the topic folder (080704 - party) within the date folder. Now move all the files with that date and of that topic into that folder. Once you have done this, you can move the folder with all of the files in one action.

Soon, that madhouse of files will become organized into the date they were shot and the topic or subject. And you don't have to re-name files with this scheme. It sounds a little complex, but it's not. What you end up with is something that looks like this in windows explorer:

christmas

-- 081225 - christmas

-- 091225 - christmas

diving

-- 090618 - clarklake

family

-- 080704 - picknic

-- 090101 - party

-- 100101 - party

misc

-- 080704 - fireworks

This also gives you two ways to reference your files. With that many files, I'd suggest you go with USB drives and a back up system. Burn the ones you want to pass out, or use most often on CD, DVD, whatever.

Oh, and never ever edit your original, make a copy of it.

Hope this helps

I have amost as much as you. I burned pictures to DVD. I used Nero. The reason I chose it is because I can tell it to make two copies and also I have it verify each copy after burning. So if I have a bad disk or anything else goes wrong, I know right away to throw it away and try again. After burning the disks I label them with the date I burned them. I store them in plastic sleeves so they don't get scratched.

Why burn them to dvd or BR for archiving.

Why not just buy a couple of drives and duplicate them over - preferable to set up a raid array so you have a copy on 2 discs.

They will last longer, it will means less work overall and they will be easier accessible.

Don't rely on Blu-Ray or DVD for permanent storage, you'd be far better off running a couple of parallel backups. And for gods sake, start organizing them from now on.

i oranize my photos with iphoto