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Heidi Dillon
Organizing Digital Photos - Part Five: Sorting Tagging
Welcome back! Last week I gave you some ideas for the kinds of photos you'll want to think about deleting and gave you a challenge to delete at least ten from your hard drive.
Grab your list of tags, your favorite photo organizing program (Lightroom, Bridge, Elements Organizer, ACDSee, iPhoto, Windows, etc.), and your Date-Grouped-Photos.
You ready? Take a deep breath. Here we go!
Step Four/Section B: Tagging and Deleting
This process should be quick. As in, if it takes more than a few seconds for you to tag a photo, you're either overthinking it, or you have too many tags to choose from.
Here's how it goes for me:
- I pull up my first photo in my monthly folder.
- I ask myself whether it's worth keeping or not.
- If it's not worth keeping, I delete it and move on to the next photo.
- If it's worth keeping, I decide which tags make the most sense to apply.
Now, let's talk about those tag categories. I use a tag for each main person in the photo. Sometimes there will be instances where there's only a person's hand in the photo, or someone is in the distant background and difficult to see. In those cases, I ask myself whether I would ever want to use this particular photo when creating projects about that person. If I would - if the hand is helping a young one learn to draw - then I tag it with that person's name. If it's just a distant image that doesn't convey any emotion or story, then I don't use that person's tag. Instead, I might choose to use a generic tag like "Family" or "Friends" to indicate that others are in the photo.
I try to use a tag for any special occasions occurring in the photo. Things like birthdays or holidays, graduations, weddings, first days of school, etc., are all things that you will probably want to find quickly. Go ahead and tag for them.
If your photo is in a special place like a vacation spot or Grandma's house, tag that. Determine if there are any significant items in a photo that may not be people. Things like pets, special toys, or any other item that might be special to you and your story might be worth tagging. If your photo shows a special tradition, like a photo of your feet at the beach or that toast for Thanksgiving dinner, try tagging those as "Traditions."
Check yourself as you're progressing through your photos. Try not to take more than a few seconds for each photo or you will get frustrated before you finish. Make sure you aren't over-tagging. It might be convenient years later to be able to find all the photos where you're wearing a red shirt, but if you try to tag for that amount of detail, it will be years before you finish!
Remember, the goal of tagging is to help you find what you're looking for more quickly than with manual searching alone, but you will still need to do some manual searching. And that's okay. You will often find things you didn't expect to find as you're looking through your photos. You don't want to tag yourself to death. Just tag enough to help you find photos with "Dad" and "Baby" when you need to or photos with "Rusty" at "Disneyland." From there, it's easy to pare down the results to that specific picture you know you have.
Tagging a photo is pretty straightforward in most software. Just have your photo highlighted and then check the appropriate boxes in your Tags or Keywords panel to apply the tags you've chosen. If you decide you don't want to use that particular tag for a picture anymore, uncheck the box. Most software will even let you have more than one photo highlighted, so it's easy to tag multiple photos with the same tags. This can save a lot of time!
Next week, finding your tagged photos.
- Heidi
Scrap Girls, Etc. is a weekly column pulling bits and pieces from all over Scrap Girls. Stay tuned each week as Scrap Girls' Jane-of-All-Trades Heidi Dillon brings you tutorials, musings, recipes, interviews, design/software tips and tricks, layout walk-throughs, and who knows what else!
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