Thirty years ago, anyone returning from vacation had, let’s say, five exposed films in their luggage. That made 180 photos. After the grossly overexposed, blurred, or otherwise messed-up pictures ended up in the trash, maybe 150 remained. They barely fit into 4 slide magazines. The magazines were labeled “Mallorca 1983” and went into the closet. That’s what we called “image management” back then. What simple times!

The flood of digital images

Since we (almost) all only take digital photos, the situation has changed fundamentally. 180 photos from a vacation, that was once. Instead, there are 1,800 or even significantly more. It’s no different for us. And that has its good side. We no longer have to limit ourselves. Disk space for a few hundred or even a thousand more photos doesn’t cost the earth, and when traveling, it’s better to be safe than sorry. True to the motto “the picture that wasn’t taken is the problem”, because it’s not easy to recreate it.

But if you come home with a stack of memory cards or even hard drives, you’re faced with a mountain of photos that have to be sifted through, organized and backed up. In order not to despair of such a mammoth task, you need a good strategy!

How to master the flood of images

The first and by far the most important task that awaits the photographer is the sorting out. Or as the well-known, unfortunately already deceased German nature photographer Fritz Pölking said:

Be Brave!

That really says it all. If you can’t part with your photos, you’ve already lost. Nobody, not even the best among us, takes only top photos. And only the best pictures should go into the archive. Because a good photographer only shows his good photos. That’s what distinguishes him from an average photographer.

For those who find it hard to throw away those great vacation photos, here’s what you can do:

  • Do not sift through the photos immediately after the vacation. After four weeks, the emotional attachment to the vacation and thus to the pictures has become much less. In addition, digital photos also lose quality over time. Want to bet?
  • For image series and variants of a subject, you decide which image you like best based on the preview images. If this photo meets your technical requirements, the others in the series are simply deleted. If it leaves something to be desired technically, you take the second best, and so on. Such a positive selection is usually more effective than sorting out the bad images.

Those who consistently carry out this first step make life much easier for themselves.

Create order

We all know the chaos that arises on the hard disk in a short time. There are photos, videos, text files and whatever else happily jumbled in “My Files” or “My XYZ”. Or, not quite as dramatic, but still anything but useful, there is a folder structure with subfolders and sub-subfolders and sub-sub-subfolders. These then have such illustrious names as “Grandma’s 80th birthday” or “Mallorca vacation 2015”, “Mallorca vacation 2014” and so on. And then, of course, there are the folders “Landscape”, “Sports club”, “Sailing trip on the Baltic Sea” and, especially popular, “Miscellaneous” (which is sometimes also called “This and that”, “Mishmash” or similar).

If you file your photos in this way, you will soon be unable to find one or two top images in the depths of the folder structure. As I always say in our courses: “The first 3,000 photos you still know personally”. With 30 thousand or 50 thousand on the other hand…., after a short time you no longer know in which Majorca vacation this brilliant sunset photo was taken. And then the search begins.

It’s much easier to simply organize the images by the date they were taken (or even just by the month they were taken). If you want to make life easy for yourself, you can simply number the folders. However, the photos must then be carefully keyworded, otherwise there is no chance to find them again. Simone will explain in a future article what you have to consider when tagging your photos.

Data backup

As soon as the images have been sorted out, organized and keyworded, it’s time to back them up. Because in the digital world, the old rule applies: one file is no file. But this topic would go beyond the scope of this article. More on the subject of data backup in a future blog post.

As usual, please feel free to leave a comment. I’m looking forward to it.