By Heidi Preslicka, Organized Thoughts

Of all the presents we receive at Christmastime, the photos and video are by far our most precious. After the holidays, there is plenty to do to “clean-up.” I would like to challenge each one of you to invest some organizing time to “clean up” your photo organization process. 

One of my contacts, Thad, wrote in a few months ago inquiring about archiving memories, namely how to store digital photos. Since you probably snapped many photos during the holiday season, this is an excellent time to think about your digital photo organization and about establishing a restoration process for your photos in the new year. Many of us have made the switch to digital photos; therefore I will focus on digital photo organization.

I suggest you transfer your digital images from your camera to your computer soon after each event. You most likely have photo organization software that came free on your computer or with your camera. There is also software you can download for free online. One program I know of, but have not used, is Picasa from Google. Other software I have heard of include: Windows Media Player, Creative Memories Memory Manager and iPhoto. These programs have similar capabilities; some have more options for managing, tagging, labeling and filing photos. They are useful to edit, e-mail, and retrieve from. Once your photos have been transferred to your computer, create a back up on hard drives or CDs. I suggest you create two back-up copies on external hard drives. These days, back-up hard drives are relatively inexpensive and have a very large capacity, allowing you to store your entire photo library on one hard drives. After you have created your back-up copies you can then erase the originals from your camera. Some of you may be technology geeks and have a back-up system that automatically creates a copy of your photo after editing or after transfer. My process is a manual system and it is for the technologically challenged - like me.

When storing photos on my external hard drives, I store them in their original file format (for me that's .jpg), using a chronological folder system. Each year has a folder, and within that folder each event has a sub-folder. I title these folders starting with the month number. If there are multiple events in the same month, each consecutive event gets a period and then a number, followed by the title of the event. For example the first event of October would be labeled “10.1 School Marathon,” the second event would be labeled “10.2 Alec’s Birthday.” If I want to browse photos from the whole year, I don’t have to open multiple folder to search, I simple scroll through the list. The events will be placed in chronological order, because the numbers are sorted in order. Since any one particular photo organizing software program may not always be available, I choose to keep photos in raw format and simply store them in folders. 

You can edit, use and share photos in a software program, but storing them in folders is a safe format. You can also store your photos on numerous on-line photo processing companies, but again I like to be in control of the safety of my photos. Don’t depend on any one particular company for the safety of your photos for your life time. Every three, six or 12 months, back up your entire photo system onto an external hard drive and store the hard drive in an off-site location - safety deposit box or relative’s house.

My system for photo organization is a very simple system. If you have the technological skills and patience to learn more, you can implement a system to easily edit photos, caption or label photos digitally, have a back-up system that works automatically, use thumbnail generation programs to search photo lists, assign key words to photos, and so on. If you want to keep things simple, remember the most important element of your photo organization is backing up your photos!

 (Heidi Preslicka is a professional organizer, offering hands-on and consulting organizing services for families and small business. She can be contacted via her Web site at www.intherightplaceorganizing.com. Her column, "Organized Thoughts" is one of several opinion and commentary pieces appearing regularly in this newspaper.)