August 23, 2008

Scrapbook Saturday #6: Organizing

verabear DigiScrapping, Scrapbook Saturday DigiScrapping 43 Comments

In nearly all digiscrapping sites and forums, you will find talk about organizing the digi-stash. With designers coming out with multiple new kits every couple of days, and freebies galore, the newbie digiscrapper easily finds herself not only out of hard drive space, but also at a loss as to which paper or element to use first!

If you’re just starting out with this hobby, then there’s no better time to start organizing your stash than now. Take it from me, I must have been in acquiring and organizing mode for a long time it actually took up the time I could have spent on actual scrapbooking.

For this edition of Scrapbook Saturday, I’d like to talk about Organizing our Photos

For me, the photos are still the star of any layout. Unless of course there is no actual photo to scrap.

We always had photos of special occassions in the family, all of which went to our numerous photo albums. There was a time though, that we didn’t have rolls of film developed. For some reason, we just put them in a shelf and we all seemed to have forgot about them.

In the days pre-digi, one could be budget conscious and would only take a few precious shots because there’s only one or two rolls of film. Sharing prints was also difficult because of the costs. Most of the time, we’d only print once and then share the negatives to those who would like to have reprints.

With digital cameras, we are now only limited to the size of storage we carry. Sharing is a snap too.

Photos are the number one digiscrapping ingredient that needs to be organized properly.

The My Pictures folder in my PC serves as my main dumping ground for photos. In the past, I never really thought about organizing photos. Each time I import photos from the camera to the PC, it just goes to one folder which I later rename (or not).

With my computer having crashed and reloaded several times through the years, I have lost some pictures (and videos) of important milestones. When I bought an external hard drive (EHD) and started organizing the files that I was to dump in there for safekeeping, I realized that I had so many picture folders all over the place. I had a hard time keeping track of them all!

From the scattered folders in the EHD, I used the My Pictures folder on my secondary drive as the root directory for all my photos. The ones I could easily group and identify, I placed in sub-folders with the event and year as titles.

There’s also a folder for my nephew Esban, within it are sub-folders depending on the occasions the pictures were taken.

Now, for newer photos, I have folders for each month. In them are sub-folders for each batch of photos taken.

Though we still have one more week in August, I already have a folder filled with this month’s photos – August 2008. It’s sub folders include Mama’s North Trip and Trinoma-UP friends; on the main folder itself are a number of random photos I’ve taken of our pets, the kids, and whatever else caught my fancy.

If you thought I’d actually have a tip here or a structure you could follow for organizing your photos, I’m sorry to disappoint. Ultimately, you gotta go with what will work for you.

I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for some time now but the last time I imported photos, I was disappointed with it. I am seriously considering finally using Windows Live Photo Gallery at home. I mentioned these two applications because they are both free, and have a functionality that will make even the least organized person, have organized photos.

TAGS

It doesn’t matter in which folder you saved your photos, if you tag them properly, it will be easy to track them down.

Tags are keywords or categories you can attach to your photos to easily identify them. These are saved on the photo’s metadata. In Picasa, or WLPG, you can run a search for specific tags, and the photos bearing them will be shown to you.

Say for example that I wanted to scrap a layout of each kid in our family opening their Christmas presents. I can run a search on my software for the following tags: Christmas, gifts, kids, plus the name of one kid. After I pick the photo, I can change the name in my string, run the search, and choose another.

Tagging will also help us organize the rest of the contents our digi-stash. More on that next time. 🙂




EDITED:

Here are the pages I’ve made so far for my mini-album: