So yes, it takes up a lot more space doing this, but it gathers the information just like you are finding.

And with your comment about fashion history, I’ll just add that in my family, two fraternal twin sisters who look very much alike got married some years apart. They wore the same dress and their mother wore the same dress, so it’s hard to tell one wedding from another. Also, some of my younger cousins had a great laugh looking at the clothes from their parents’ wedding pictures.

Although I’m very much an amateur and own only a few actual photos, my sister and various cousins started scanning & sharing about 10 years ago. For a long time I kept the photos in folders named for the person who sent them rather than by who was in them. Finally I realized that copying into different folders would help. Reading that you make multiple copies makes me feel like I’m doing it right, so thank you!

On an external drive I’m slowly working on one enormous folder with medium size copies of all photos mixed together – all branches of my family, my husband’s family, inlaws, etc., using file names that start with my best guess at the year. Seeing the faces in approximate chronological order has helped me ID a lot more of the people & the photo timeline is not just fun, but seems to add sociology, anthropology & fashion history to the images.

Annie in Austin

PS I do enjoy your tweets!

I started adding tags, but stopped pretty quickly. It just wasn’t working for me. My naming scheme isn’t any more perfect than my folder scheme, but for now it seems to work. The important part is getting it organized. I can deal we re-organizing later if I need to.

My file naming method still has flaws, but it’s better than it was. For specific events when I have a collection of pictures, the file name is: date – event – number – subject. The number just keeps them chronological (which my OCD requires) and allows for repeated subjects. For instance, I have multiple pictures of just my cousin at her wedding, so they would all be the same file name without a number. The subject is sometimes names of everyone in the picture and sometimes a more general description. From that same wedding, I have one that says “Zonenshein Family”. If that got separated from the collection and someone didn’t know them, that would be a problem to identify them, I know, but for now it’s OK. For larger groups, I have a text file with an identical name that lists everyone.

For other photos that have no dates or aren’t in a large event collection, I usually list the subject, then date if known, then event if known (wedding, graduation, etc.). A lot of photos have no date, so if I have repeat photos of the same people, I have to start numbering them: “Bob and Rachel Tucker – 1″, “Bob and Rachel Tucker – 2″, etc.

I got over my aversion to using spaces in file names years ago, but some people still insist on underscores, periods, or hyphens. I lean towards using periods now; that’s how I am renaming the source documents that I was organizing before I stopped to do photos. When I resize the photos to put on my family web site, I will rename them without spaces again since the Web is a bit fickle with file names and spaces (fills them in with +s or other codes). When I upload to the blog, it doesn’t matter to me to change the file names.

I am also in the process or organizing and scanning my old photos. This is the hardest part. How to organize. I do it by Surname.

I would like to know how you label your old photos. I do the following: Surname_FirstName, date if known, place/explanation of photo. I add a _ between Surname and First Name, should I be doing this between all words? If so what is the purpose of this.

Thanks for the post.