Written by Tony Cataldo, Professional Photo Organizer
I must constantly battle clutter. Clutter seems to have a life of its own and seems to spontaneously increase. A small stack of papers soon turns into a large pile that takes more time and effort to organize. There is also “Digital Clutter” that has many of the same characteristics as physical clutter and includes digital photos, electronic records, emails, etc.
Some digital clutter, such as an email Inbox, is annoying but not too dangerous. If your computer crashes then those emails are probably stored on a server. Other types of digital clutter are not forgiving. Most people have LOTS of digital images stored in a computer (often in multiple folders), in the device, on memory cards, etc. If the device or computer died or was stolen then those images could be lost forever.
Digital clutter includes images still in the camera, images in multiple places on one or more computers, images stored on CDs, memory cards, thumb drives, etc., duplicate and unsorted images. But, digital clutter is curable. Once you get into the habit of organizing images it takes very little time. Ways to combat digital clutter include:
1. Create a single folder for your images to make them easier to find and backup.
2. Create a #Todo folder in the Photo folder and use it when organizing images.
3. Sort your photos by date, event, person, type, or a combination of those.
4. Group your images in sub-folders or by renaming them.
5. Delete the images that are nearly identical. They may all be good but you do not need multiple copies of the same image. Be brutal and very selective at this stage.
6. Be picky and consider deleting inferior versions of the same image. For example, you might have a folder with pictures of the Seattle Space Needle. As you take new Space Needle photos review the similar images and keep the best ones. This reduces the number of images and your images should get progressively better over time.
Deleting images is difficult. You may have 300 photos from a birthday party and you want to keep all of them. Have you ever seen parents who set up a video camera at a party and just let it run for hours? The result is a very long video that they will probably never watch. However, if that video were edited to 5-minutes of the best moments then it would probably be watched.
If you took 300 images at a birthday party how likely are you to view all of those images? Probably not very likely. If you carefully sorted the images and kept the 20-30 best images then you would be much more likely to view them. Keep this in mind when sorting, filtering, and editing your images. Strive for quality of images over quantity of images. Periodically review past photos and delete the inferior images. Images may seem fantasic shortly after shooting them but they may seem dull or uninteresting after several months.
This article is a very high-level overview of the problems with digital clutter. A professional photo organizer can help you with getting this clutter under control. One huge problem with digital clutter is that you risk losing your images if your computer fails. The goal is to organize and preserve your images. Feel free to contact me for help with slaying the digital clutter monster.
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