Elephant Juice: Flashback, Memory book & digital photo organization

Monday, March 22, 2010

Flashback, Memory book & digital photo organization

My print lab was having a sale on their little bound books, so I thought I'd take advantage of it and print a whole book of Barrett's 2009 Memories. It's nice to have the Blurb books of my blog/our family scrapbook, but I don't actually PRINT OUT our everyday pictures often enough. I'm excited to get it and see if I want to make one for 2008 too!

These little bound books are what I use for my clients' proof books/keepsake books. It is a collection of all their edited and final session images, with a custom cover, and spiral bound. I've always said they are great to stick in your purse, or give to grandmas as brag books...but I've never actually ordered one for MYSELF! Hello!!

This is what they look like:

{A peek at how I organize my pictures}

I am in NO way a pro at organizing my personal digital images. My way is pretty much a no-brainer. Nothing incredibly genius! I would love to hear how some of you do it, if you have a system that works for you! I'm SURE there is a much better way than what I do!!

I organize my pictures in folders by year (2008, 2009, 2010).
In each of the yearly folders, I have folders for every month (January, February, etc.).
Everytime I download pics, it creates a folder named for date they were taken (example: 2009_10_04)

At the end of each month, I drag all of the dated folders for that month into the main monthly folder.

If there are special events for the month, I will name the folder for that, (Halloween, Brandon & Jenn's Wedding, etc.) instead of keeping it labeled with the date.

Here's a screenshot of my picture filing ---->
My October 2009 folder has all of the random "date taken" folders in it. I like to keep them named with the date taken, so I can go back and easily find pictures I'm looking for. OR when I look back, I quickly know that the picture was taken on October 4, 2009. Halloween was a special event in October, so it has it's own folder.

Now, does anyone know how to manually arrange my folders, or arrange by date?? It drives me crazy that it's alphabetically, and they're not in chronological order. I'm pretty sure on PC's there's an easy way to choose between alphabetical and chronological, but I can't figure it out on my Mac. Help!

Back to Barrett's 2009 Memory book...

I just went through each of the monthly 2009 folders and picked a a handful of my favorite pics for the book. I'm not even sure how many I ended up with! Close to 100, I think :)

While looking back, I found these pictures (some of my favorites of him) from March 2009.