How do you organize your photo files? Is there a more sensible way to do it?

You are quite right it very quickly becomes difficult to manage digital photo's.

Firstly I would recommend that you ensure that the date and time on your camera is set correctly as the time stamp can help you find pictures but it is far from ideal.

My recommendation would be to try and re-name all of your pictures as you copy them onto your computer. This is a tedious process but there are products like 'Winsome File Renamer' which can help.

With this you can set up rules for renaming large numbers of files (such as your pictures) using different rules. With this you can make the file name contain the time stamp of the picture or a 'serial number' for example.

It is quite a simple task to down load all of your pictures from your holiday for example and rename all of them as 'Holiday 2012 (July 15, 11:00:00) for example. This will help you find them in future using Windows Explorer.

If you want to be more specific you can download the original file names as set by your camera and put these into an Excel File. From the time stamp you can create a timetable of your holiday setting out times and dates when you are at different locations and use this to create a new file name. If there is more than one picture at any location the renamer will number them sequentially for you.

It all depends on how much you want to do! I would say it is easier to do this as you go along rather than waiting five years and then trying to re-name them all at once!

Good Luck.

Steve

Big picture folder and then a dated folder with a very brief description or abbreviation :) just so you know whats in there

Ohh