Organization is not my strong point. I will admit this freely and I would have to guess that a majority of the people that shoot digital photography would agree to the same problem. You simply take your pictures and dump them onto your computer desktop and continue on with shooting or dealing with life's next task. It's really hard to get time away from work, family, home maintenance, television, cooking, cleaning, eating, sleeping, and other personal projects to just take photos, much less to maintain a quality organizational solution. I would guess that most of you reading this just download your photos to folders on your desktop or if you're really ambitious you've created folders named for each dump from your camera by subject, event or some random name that means something to you personally. Maybe they have dates on them, maybe they don't. There really is nothing wrong with doing it this way if it works for you but honestly there are better, more efficient ways and they are getting easier and better every day. Honestly though, it doesn't work for me — I need help.

Personally this was the extent of my organization until I finally decided on a program to help me organize my photos. I started by trying to group photos by event or maybe subject. Sometimes I divided them into black and white and color but in the end I always ended up being confused by my own organization. I can't count the number of times that I thought that I had backed up a certain folder or maybe I thought that I duplicated photos from one folder to another just to find out that I just deleted my only copy. Sometimes I would tend to have duplicate versions of photos that were exactly the same taking up valuable storage space.

I guess there are worse things but my point here is that we need an organizational solution and we all need some level of help. Most people need help whether they will admit it or not. So as an exercise for myself and others I am going to give you some pointers on several solutions. As with everything else in the vast, ever changing computer universe there is always a better way. Not everything will work for everyone and what works for one will not work for another.

My goal here is to give you a starting point to help you choose your own path and to get you thinking about a basic solution instead of dumping years of photos randomly into folders. The goal of this series is archiving your photos and organization is a large part of that process. You could have a rock solid storage solution on the best and most reliable media but it doesn't do you much good if you can't find your photos when you need them. This becomes an even larger problem when you go beyond the average "dad" snapping family snapshots. When you get into taking thousands of photos each month you need a reliable and sane way to name, date and categorize your work. Advanced users would probably enjoy a search feature, the ability to sort by keyword or maybe by color or black and white, horizontal or vertical, and to easily retrieve technical data like exposure information, size, lens, etc. To get started though I'll walk you though the most basic solution and then move on to a few other options.