How to Organize a Photo Collection

Whether you have an unmanageable amount of digital photos saved onto your computer or boxes full of developed pictures waiting to be put into albums, organizing your photo collection may seem like a challenging and time consuming task. The following steps will help you to organize your photo collection in a simple fashion, so that you spend less time finding your pictures and more time enjoying them.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Organize Digital Photos

1. Create a folder named "My Pictures" on your computer if you don't already have a folder labeled for pictures on your computer.
2. Make subfolders within the "My Pictures" folder for each year from which you have digital pictures saved on your computer.
3. Name special subfolders within each year folder that pertain to the particular events that you photographed. For example, if you have a batch of photos from a trip you took to California, name the folder "California trip."
4. Divide all of your digital pictures into the appropriate subfolders.
5. Download photos from your camera to your computer as you take them, continue to create new subfolders for each individual event or time period and divide your pictures into the appropriate subfolder each time you download a new batch.

Organize Photos into Albums

6. Buy enough photo albums to store all of the developed pictures that you have stashed around the house.
7. Organize the albums either chronologically or by subject. If you choose to organize your photos by subject, you could have a holiday album, family party album and albums for each of your kids for example.
8. Label each album according to the content, and place your developed photos into the appropriate album.
9. Store your albums in a common room where you spend a lot of time so that you can look at your photos and show them to company whenever you would like.