When it comes to maintaining the organization of your photo collection consistency is key!
December Tip – Create a Keyword List
I strongly recommend that clients create a Keyword List to use when tagging their photos. Using consistent words makes searching these terms easier and more accurate. Think of your keywords as the “who, what, where” information for your photos. If you are using the names of family members include the last name. Keep your Keyword List short – limit it to 15-20 terms. Start with family names and re-occurring holidays you might search (Christmas, Halloween, Birthday). We visit a cottage every summer so all of my pictures from this vacation are tagged with “Cottage”. If you travel be sure to tag the photos of your trip with the country name or a term that will group all those pictures together – Hawaii or Cruise. Write down your Keyword List and refer to it each time you add tags to your photos – the more consistent you can be the more searchable your collection will be.
Digital Photo Organization – Tag Your Photos with Keywords and Add Comments
You may come across the terms “Tagging” and “Keywording” when working with your photos. For our purposes we will consider them the same thing – we are going to “tag” our photos with the “keywords” we identified in our Keyword List. The main idea is to get some identifying words, the who, what, where, attached to your photos. There are many fields available in the metadata of a photo and photographers often use them for different things. As long as you identify a field you can easily view when working with your pictures its OK to use it for tagging your photos. Just be aware that if you switch software programs and look at your photos in a different software you may not be able to see your tags. Don’t panic, they’re most likely still there! The other software program may just be displaying different fields than your first program – usually you can change your settings so the fields you are recording data in can be viewed.
This tagging process is very common in working with photos so any photo editing or photo management software should show you fields you can use to add your keywords. It may be called “tags”, “comments”, “description”, or any other name as the labels on these fields are not always consistent between software programs. I work on a PC and when I look at the properties of a photo I see a field labelled “Tags” and another labelled “Comments”. I use the “Tags” field to record my keywords – the who, what, where of the picture. I also use the “Comments” field if I have more of a story to tell about that picture – for instance I might use the Comments field to record that a baby picture is my son’s very first picture or that a picture of a family barbeque was the one we had the night before John and Cindy’s wedding. I don’t add comments to every picture – that would be far too time-consuming! I do, however, try to add some of the story around events, I think of my children showing the pictures to their children without me there to fill in the details. So often it’s the stories that keep the pictures meaningful!
If you do not use photo editing or photo management software, you can access these fields as follows:
On a PC – right click on a photo then go to Properties and Details. You will see a field called “Tags” and another called “Comments”. I use the “Tags” field for my Keywords and the “Comments” field if I have a story to record about the photo. These fields can be updated for many photos at a time – select all your photos from Hawaii, right click on the first photo selected and move to the “Tags” field. Enter your keyword “Hawaii” and hit enter. The keyword “Hawaii” will be in the tags field on all the photos you selected. This works for the “Comments” field too.
On a MAC – If you use the software “Photos” on your MAC, select the photos to which you want to add keywords. In the Info window, click the add a keyword field (or the field where other keywords appear if you’ve already added some), then type a keyword and press return to add it to the photos. If you do not use the software app “Photos” you can select your image and open the information window with Command-I. You can re-name your picture here and add tags and comments in the box called Spotlight Comments.
I use the software Photo Mechanic to add tags and comments to my photo collection – but even with this powerful software I still need to individually select each photo I want to tag. It can be a very time-consuming process and I recommend you do it in steps. Often, I will dedicate a week to tagging all the photos from a given year and do only 2 or 3 keywords a day. This keeps me from making mistakes (and, frankly, from hating the task too much!) Here are some other photo editing and management software you may want to check out:
Lightroom
ACDSee Photo Studio
Smart Pix Manager
Photos for the MAC
A quick Google search will bring up lots of options – now that you know how you want to organize your photos you can make an informed decision if you choose to purchase software. I like to work with my photos in the software but I keep my collection outside of the software, I like having my collection independent so I have control over it.
Now that you have tagged your photos with your Keywords you can search them using the power of your computer. Open the folder with your photos and search any of your keywords – your computer should return all the images that have been tagged with that word. Now try combining your keywords or a date – something like Halloween 2017 – your computer should retrieve these images much faster than you could do yourself! Now you can find any specific picture in a flash! Be sure to back up your collection – once it’s organized you only need to add the new photos as you take them!
I hope you enjoy your beautifully organized photo collection! If you got stuck in the process, or just didn’t have time to dedicate to organizing, please contact me – having an organized and backed up collection takes away all the stress associated with your photos and it’s really only a few days away – I’d be happy to help!
Happy Holidays everyone!