How to Organize Photos Tutorial

This tutorial shows you how to organize your digital photos. I use Adobe Bridge to organize my photos because it has a lot of features so this tutorial uses Bridge as an example. There are a lot of other good photo organization programs out there though such as Picasa and iPhoto. Try out a few programs and see what works best for you.

Folders versus TagsYou can organize photos in to folders or tags (or use a combination of both). You can think of a folder as like an actual folder you use offline. You put items in to different folders, but you can't put the same item in to two folders.

A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword (or term) that you can put on to each file. The good thing about tags compared to folders is you can put multiple tags on the same file. So if I have a photo that is tagged "Food", I can also tag it "Dessert" and "Cakes". When I click each of those tags, the photo will show up.

My Set Up
Since I have a lot of photos, I like to put my main categories in to folders and also use tags for each photo. I originally had all my photos in to folders, but since I've discovered tags, I've really liked using those too.

In my Pictures folder, I have folders for my main categories such as Artwork, Etsy, Internet Photos and My Photos. Inside each of these folders, I have all my photos tagged.

For this example, I'll show an example with my Internet Photos folder because I have a lot of photos here. I have a ton of internet photos saved so I have more folders inside the Internet Photos folder.

Here's my "Animals" folders. I have keywords/tags in the left corner for different types of animals such as cats, cows, deer, etc.

For example, if you click "cats" it shows up all my photos tagged with "cat" show up:

Tagging PhotosTo add tags in Adobe Bridge, I use the Keywords feature. Just click the "Keyword" button on the right side of Bridge next to "Metadata".

To add a tag, click on a photo (or use the Control button and select multiple photos) and select a tag to use. I already have Keywords set up in these screen captures. To add a new keyword, click the arrow button on the upper right side and selet "New Keyword". Once you set up new keywords, they'll always be there so you can use them again and again. You can also put Keywords inside each other to make it easier to organize. For example, I have "cats" under "animals", but both are tags.

For this photo of a white cat, I'm selecting "Animals" and "Cats" as a tag.



Renaming Files
Renaming files is another way you can organize your photos on Bridge. Batch renaming makes changing file names easy to do. To rename a batch of files, I select the files I want to rename and and go to "Tools" and then click "Batch Rename". For this example, I rename some cat photos "cat_onedigit" (one digit is a number that changes with each photo to make a unique file name).

Batch renaming is helpful if you want to find files easily. Since tags don't split photos in to folders, it can be harder to find files if you want to upload them. Renaming them makes it easier so you can just search for that file name.

RatingsI also like using ratings to keep track of my favorite photos. You can rate files from 1-5 stars (I usually just use 4 and 5 stars for photos I really like). In this example, I selected a cute photo of kittens cuddling to rate five stars:

Go to "Label" and select the number of stars you want to rate the photo. You can also click on the photo and click on the five dots beneath it to select the number of stars you want to rate the photo. To rate more than photo at once, select the photos all at once by using the Command button.

To see photos you've rated, select the Stars on the left side of the screen.

That's the method I use to organize my photos. How do you organize photos on your computer?