I got my first digital camera in 2000. Since then, I’ve taken about 68,000 photos and videos, taking up ~600Gigabytes of space.
It takes a lot of work to manage all these files, and it’s easy for things to become a real mess.
You know what I’m talking about. You copy all the photos off your memory card to your PC, and then put the card back in your camera without clearing the card. Then 2 months later you copy the same files to your computer again, and you are wondering whether these files are the same as the other ones that are already on your computer. It would take forever to compare them all, so you just keep both sets so you don’t lose anything.I keep two copies of all of my files, on two different PC’s, in case anything bad happens (I had an issue where Picasa corrupted about 2months of files a few years ago and learned my lesson) so I have 1.2TB of digital media to manage.
When the iPhone 4 came out, I bought two, one for myself to replace my iPhone classic – the original, and one for my wife to replace her LG feature phone. Welcome to the future dear! One problem, the iPhone names photos as IMG_0000.JPG, and we both just bought new phones, so the counter started at 1 for both of us at the same time. So when we tried to copy all the photos from both our cameras to our PC – we had two different photos with the same name! Now what? I decided to rename the files before putting them in the photo library, but what a pain. I used a cool program called Name Mangler for a bit to make this easier, but still the whole process took a long time. I had to write a document that explained the process that needed to happen so that I could remember how to do it.
This eventually became such a pain that I could never find the time to sort through my files. I had 6 months of files stacked up that needed to be sorted and added to my photo library at one point.
I’ve spoken to a number of people about this – they have the same problem; their photo and video collections are growing like crazy, but it’s a real bear to keep it organized, backed up, and consistent. Whats’ your method of organizing?
Vector15 makes Mac and iOS digital organization software, including Silent Sifter for organizing your photos and videos.