correctmyphotos

How many different events photos are in your camera?
This post is for my friend, Bill, and the many other amateur photographers who take pictures of various events but don’t download (or upload, if you prefer) them to their computer until the camera memory chip is about full. During lunch the other day Bill was telling me (actually he was quite proud of himself) that he had downloaded 175 photos from his camera and edited (cropped and color corrected) them with CorrectPhoto which he had just installed on his new Windows 7 computer. It turns out the photos had been taken throughout the summer and early fall and during trips to the cabin, Napa Valley, and the Thanksgiving trip to see the grandkids in Texas. He had uploaded all the photos to a single folder and then proceeded to edit the good photos and delete the bad and ended up with about 125 good photos. However, they were from about six different events and he didn’t know how to group them into categories. “How do I do that?” he asked. While this may sound like a dumb question my guess is that there are many people with digital cameras that have the same question. In fact, when I mentioned this to another friend, Dick M, he admitted that he had a camera full of photos taken over the last six months and had the same questions.

Download and Organize Your Photos Before Editing
A number of months ago I wrote a post on transferring photos from your camera to computer so I won’t go into details of the procedure again.  Here is the process I used to organize the photos I took in November 2009. Note that I am now using Windows 7 so the screen shots might look a little different if you are using Windows XP or Vista, but the basics are the same.

1. Download photos to November 2009 file folder in My Pictures folder. 

Download photos to new folder in My Pictures folder

First, I created a New Folder (November 2009) within the My Pictures folder and downloaded all of the photos on the memory card to this folder. You could create multiple folders if you know what is on the memory card. But, if you are like me you probably don’t remember all the photos you took since the last time you transferred photos from your camera to computer.

2. Create New Sub-Folders to Categorize the Photos

After looking at the photos decide how many sub-folders you need to organize them. In my example, I decided to create four folders: Rotary, Garden, Elmore Cabin, and Bill’s Tools.

Create New Subfolders-Right click/New/Folder

To create the new sub-folders simply Right Click the mouse and then click on New-Folder and then name the folder. In this example I decided to keep all of the folders within the November 2009 folder, however, you could create separate folders under the My Pictures folder if you prefer.

3. Cut and Paste Photos into Selected Folder

Now you can select the photos you want to put into a specific folder (Hold the CTRL key down and click on the photos or the SHIFT key to select the first and last photos in a series) and then Right Click and click on Cut.

Select Photos the Cut and Paste into new folder

In this example I selected the photos I took at a Rotary meeting and pasted them into the Rotary folder. Just click on the selected folder, Right Click, and Paste to transfer the photos from the main November 2009 folder to the Rotary folder. Repeat the process until you have moved all of the photos to their respective folders and you will have organized your photos.

Repeat process until all photos are placed in new folders

Now that the photos have been organized the next step is to edit the ones that are worth fixing and keeping and deleting the ones that are not. And, you can rename then photo files if you like. I will talk about that in another post. There are number of post in my blog on photo editing. Go to http://www.correctmyphotos.com/category/photo-editing/

This is the easiest way to organize your photos using the file organizing features of the Windows operating systems (Win XP, Vista, and Windows 7). There are certainly more sophisticated organizing tools available in Windows Photo Gallery and Photoshop Elements, however, I prefer to control the process and keep it simple.

Wayne  www.correctphoto.com