I've also come to realize that my tidy, little mind (with OCD tendencies) had not been using the best system for organizing my excessive collection of images. Here's what my "Pictures" folder looks like. As you can see, I'd oh-so-neatly dumped everything into it's corresponding year, with a few specialized folders for miscellaneous type items.
I'd then broke it down further (as any obsessive organizer would), so that within each year we have (of course!) the 12 months of the year.
Yes, it's worked adequately for a time, but here's the deal. If I want to find pictures of my grandson's 3rd birthday, I can pretty quickly find what I'm looking for. March is March and always will be - just get the year right. But what if I want to find all the pictures I've ever taken of yellow roses? Or pictures of my dog? Holy cow! Now we're getting into some major time issues!
Obviously I should have taken advantage of key words and some type of organizer. So that's my next task. I've never really explored the organizer that comes with Photoshop Elements. Stupid, I know - been right under my nose all this time. So does anyone have any advice? Has anyone used the PSE organizer or have any other program to suggest?
I certainly hope someone has advice for you on this topic. Oddly enough, I have our photos organized in EXACTLY the same hierarchy, and have run into the search issues you describe. Ideas have been rolling around in my head for years, but nothing sticks, so I just keep dumping files into year/month. I used to have a set of category folders in every month, but eventually that got dropped.
ReplyDeleteWell great minds obviously think a like... and I've come to the conclusion that how we are storing them isn't the problem. It's the lack of utilizing a program to tag them, making it easy to retrieve what you want. I've just started playing around with the Photoshop Elements Organizer and it seems pretty simple -- plus you can batch tag. So I can dump all 400 (or whatever) pictures from Disneyland and tag them as "Disneyland" with a click of the button. Big job ahead trying to get everything from the past taken care of, but at least if I start doing it from this point forward, it'll be an improvement.
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