Organizing Photos
May 8th, 2008
As part of our effort to simplify and minimize our stuff, I scanned all of our photographs taken and developed before we owned digital cameras. I made a backup of the photos and threw away the originals, reducing the clutter in our storage closet by two shoe boxes. I imported the photos into iPhoto and then forgot about them until earlier this month when I started experimenting with Photoshop by following The Pioneer Woman’s tutorials. As I rediscover my old photos, I am challenged by three questions.
What is the best way to organize my photos? Currently, I use iPhoto on my Macbook with photos separated into Events such as “Honeymoon” and “New Year’s Eve”, although I do have so many pictures of my cats that I have created a single event of cat photos for each year – “Cats – 2007″, “Cats – 2008″, etc. Another concern is whether or not to delete photos. Obviously, I will delete irreparable blurry or unflattering photos, but what about the fifteen identical photos of my cat licking her paws? Will I ever look at all fifteen of them again? Or should I choose just one to keep forever?
How can I integrate iPhoto with Photoshop? Specifically, should I re-import into iPhoto the photos edited with Photoshop or should I use iPhoto only to store the original photos and create a separate directory for Photoshopped images? Furthermore, I only have Photoshop for Windows. This means that when I want to edit a photo, I must export it from iPhoto, save it to a shared directory, and open it on my desktop computer. Currently, my Photoshopped images are stored on my desktop computer while the original photos are on my laptop. This inconsistency troubles me.
How can I make my old photos meaningful? I am afraid that leaving them unorganized on my computer will mean that I will never look at them again. By uncovering them, giving them some attention in Photoshop, and uploading them to Flickr, there is a higher likelihood that the pictures will be remembered. At the very least, they will be organized and catalogued for future review, possibly by children or grandchildren.
