While we have been away I have been working on making some order of my digital photographs. It is all too easy to simply download them from the camera and go no further.
My earlier feeble attempts had resulted in me putting the photos from each major holiday since December 2005 into their own folder. I had not made any further progress.
During this holiday I have sorted through each folder and selected those that have some merit and deleted many which simply do not make the grade.
The joy of digital photography is that you can take lots of shots and then choose the best ones. However, after taking heaps of photos, you do need to actually follow through and complete the process by deleting those that are not worth keeping. You know the ones – sloping horizons, blurry, too far away, can’t remember why you took it etc.
After culling the excess, the next step was to number them so that they would stay in the order I wanted them. The system I use is a 3 digit numeral eg: 001, 002 and so on which is followed by a description. Without the numerals at the beginning the photos will be sorted alphabetically by the title which is not helpful when you want them to follow a sequence.
I have completed the descriptions on the photos for 6 of the trips plus about half of our last trip in May. I also made sure that I have done the ones for the current trip and kept up to date each day. This is how I intend to do it in the future 🙂
Once I have done all of the holiday photos I will then need to work on all other the others – children, grandchildren, house, garden etc. It will be a long process but hopefully worth it in the end.
Inspired by Sandra, I will then scan all of the existing print photos that are in albums and sort them in a similar way. Hopefully, my children will never have to sort through shoeboxes full of un-named photographs when I am gone.
I have included some of the photos that I regard as the best of what I have sorted through recently. I hope you enjoy them.
organised castle 
Fairy absolutely stunning photos. And great work on the sorting. I should spend the next couple of boring days here doing exactly the same thing.
Fantastic advice on sorting photos. I need to do some work on my digital photos, so will be re-reading your post for inspiration.
We keep reminding each other to continually keep up with sorting photos. I have tried the numbering idea, but what do you do when you get to the end and find one that should have been at the beginning? you must be more organised than me I think?
Your photos are beautiful and Yes i agree that there should be digital decluttering but honestly if I did all that (my computer files are reasonable but still not that good) and scanned all my album photos as well it would literally take hours and hours and hours. Can I justify this? Its like all the recipes that I have collected and they should be better organized but I don’t have enough time to cook all the recipes and certainly not enough years of my life left to even cook a small portion of those I have collected. Sometimes I think the digital age has made more work for us and maybe we need to be more selective in what we do. It is easy to go click click click but then we have to go click click click again to delete them. In my case deleting just one photo on my photo programme takes a few seconds. Add up all the seconds and you have minutes and then hours and life is too short. sorry about the ramble.
Between me and Hubby we have started doing that too and hope to have them all organised one day:0) Your holiday pics look nice and now I want a holiday.
Totally understand about not tkaing pics we were the same after all the floods, couldn’t bring myself to take photos of houses that were destroyed as a respect to the people living in those houses, it also infuriated me the number of people driving around just to have a look and taking pics while the residents were so upset by their loss.
I needed this post! My photo’s are in a terrible terrible mess! I have heaps of double ups, treble ups etc., and they’re all over the shop. Maybe that’s my 2012 goal – to just do one thing, and that’s sort my photo’s out…
I am going to scan all of my old photographs one day too