Don’t we just love to take pictures? May it be weddings, birthdays, or just simple everyday hangouts with friends, pictures make it possible to preserve the good memories for a lifetime. Today’s digital cameras allow us to take unlimited number of pictures unlike the film cameras of the 90’s. However, we often save the files in our PC without organizing, leaving our hard drives cluttered with files.

I spent the whole evening trying to organize my picture files from my old PC. The problem is I have tons of pictures that have no labels whatsoever. Even so, some pics are duplicated making the problem worse. What I did was manually view the pictures before I store them in a separate directory.

In summary, here are tips (I learned the hard way) for organizing your picture files:

Most important: always set your camera’s date settings correctly – this will make the whole process easier. With this, you will be able to arrange the files by date so there’s no worry about missing any pictures.

Label your directories – be creative. Don’t just label the directory using the date, otherwise it’s just useless. Give it a brief description and make it unique.

Use a temp directory for new files – don’t paste your new files right away. Whenever you filled up your camera’s memory card, copy its contents to a temporary directory. When you have spare time, copy the files to their new directory and delete them from temp. This way, you make sure that all files are backed up and nothing is lost or duplicated.

Lastly, do backups – backing up files are very important, because you’ll never know when your PC will break down. I personally do multiple backups of my important files. You can save your data in hard portable hard drives or burn them in DVD. Alternatively, you can upload them in online backup sites in the net (just make sure that your files are password encrypted.