He's a Mac, I'm a PC {photo storage}

I take a lot of photos.  I almost think that might be a bit of an understatement, that’s how many photos I actually take.  Truth be told, I don’t even share half of what I take.  I couldn’t or I would inundate you with photos.

Before I bought my dSLR and before I took photography classes, I still took a lot of photos, but definitely not nearly as many, so it was fairly easy to keep track of my photos.  I run a window’s based system that has a folder in the start button called “Pictures”.  How easy is that.  I would create a new folder.  Give it a name and dump them in, but even before that I would just dump them all into that pictures folder.  Toward the beginning of the digital age I didn’t take “that” many photos {but I still took a lot, don’t get me wrong}. 

When I started dating hubby, he had a Mac laptop.  They have this whole special software system thingy (very technical name) that sorts all your photos for you and does face recognition, etc.  Well that was about the same time I started taking gobs of photos.  I couldn’t very well put them off on his laptop because that would overload his hard drive.

So this is the system that I’ve created for myself.  I know there is software out there for photo storage, but….

I keep the current years photos off on my laptop.  January 1-December 31.  Once we hit January of the next year I go through and dump them off (in the dead external hard drive, or until it died I did) on the desktop I have for photo storage.

I try to keep the folders on my desk top and the folders on my laptop the same so it makes moving them over/off easy.

{click on photos to make bigger if you’d like}

So it’s on the hard drive of the desktop.  In the drive labeled Photos.  There I have my big main folders: Down on the Farm, Our Home, Birthday’s, Cheerleading, etc.

Then you click on {example} Down on the farm and they are broken down into sub folders based off topic & date they were taken.

And Viola, you open up a sub folder and here’s all the pictures taken on that date.

Now some folders {ie} Blogging topics are broken down by year.

Then broken down by what happened in that year on a particular date.

Open the folder, and there you have it.

I really have no method as to why some are broken down into sub folders by year and then broken down in to the topic at hand and others are just dumped in by topic at hand.

Sometimes I have photos of the dogs & the horses & people in a Down on the Farm folder, so if I ever wanted to go hunting, I’d have to remember where we were to find the particular item being looked for {ie person, dog, horse, etc}.  I know there has to be an easier method out there.

One of the ladies I work with sorts all hers by date.  Nothing other than date.  I think I would get really confused by that, but at the same time, different things work for different people.

I just wondered how everyone else sorts their pictures so you know where to find things you are looking for?