How to Organize an Image Bank

As digital cameras continue to come down in price and become easier to use, amateur photographers are using them to take thousands of pictures. As a result, computer hard drives fill up with a lot of pictures, and organizing them efficiently can be a challenge. Ideally, your image bank should be filed in way that individual pictures can be found based on date and event and/or subject.

• 1

  Create a new folder within your "pictures" folder, and name the new folder by the year it was created. For example: "2010 Originals."

• 2

  Connect your camera using a USB cable or insert the memory card into a card reader to download photos to the folder. When downloading photos, the camera will automatically create a subfolder on your computer and assign a date to it.

• 3

  Tag your photos as soon as you download them to your computer. A photo "tag" is a way to identify the image or series of images by a common element. If your photos were taken at a cottage, you may want to include words such as "cottage," "boat," "lake" or "vacation" as tags for that group of pictures. Once the photos have been tagged, type the key word into the "search" field in the upper right corner of your "pictures" folder, and your computer will locate all the pictures with that keyword.

• 4

  Save edited versions of original pictures in a sub-folder inside the yearly "originals" folder you created earlier. Be sure to include the year within the file name of each picture. Design a file-name template that includes three to five letters that can identify the subject -- "HLDAY" for "Holiday," for example -- and the date and year. Your file name may look like this: 001HLDAY0510. The first series of numbers indicate the order in which the photos were edited: 001, 002, 003, etc. From the rest of the file name, you can determine the pictures were taken on a holiday in May 2010.