Organizing Pictures – a simple process

There may be an infinite number of ways to approach organizing digital pictures. And since it doesn’t cost anything to snap the picture, we have way more pictures to deal with. Often this results in pictures scattered everywhere, and frustration trying to find the ones you are looking for. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my favorite picture organizing program is Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE). I’ve tried a few other programs, but not really long enough to evaluate them. PSE does everything I need.

I am going to assume a basic knowledge of selecting pictures, creating tags, and filtering using tags. Contact me if you would like help with those concepts.

Professional photographers advise being ruthless with the <Delete> button. We have all been bored silly looking at redundant and uninteresting pictures. Even with that advice, sometimes it is hard. Here is a method that gets the best of both extremes.

1. Start by limiting the number of photos you are working with. The best way to do this is to import pictures every day that you take them (instead of waiting until the end of the month/year).
2. Tag the imported pictures with a general descriptor (I’m going to use “road trip”)
3. Apply the “road trip” filter so that only those pictures are visible in your organizer
4. Select all the pictures (Ctrl + a generally works), and click one star on any of the selected pictures. This will give all selected pictures 1 star.
   
5. Quickly go thru the pictures and decide to keep or not
   1. If in doubt keep
   2. For “no keep” pictures, remove the star
6. Now display only the images with no stars, select all and delete them (your organizer  will be blank)
   
7. Change the star filter to 1 star and higher
   
8. Create and add tags to all the 1 star pictures
9. Go thru the pictures again, this time assigning 2 or more stars to the best ones.
10. Now filtering with the “road trip” tag and view “2 stars and higher” will display best pictures
11. (the 1 star pictures are candidates for deletion, but with today’s large storage capacities, they can be kept forever … just in case 😉

I promised a “simple” process. Of course, simple is relative. Ten steps to photo organization doesn’t see too bad to me. Let me know what you think. Do you have refinements, or a totally simpler method?