Thursday, December 12, 2013

Organizing: The mental game I mostly lose.

     At the risk of sounding like a shill for Flip-Pal - who provided me their fab portable scanner free of charge - I must (again) promote the idea of digitizing all those old photographs before it's too late. Because, you never know. Your house might burn to the ground, or a hoarder reality show might come calling and toss out your picture boxes like so much garbage. I have managed to scan about 70% of my photos (no small feat) and am now brainstorming ways to organize them. Not easy for a right-brained person like myself.
     My current plan is to create folders titled with the addresses of where I've lived, then fill them with photo albums from events that happened while I was living in that particular place - parties, holidays, vacations, silly moments, etc. 
    The plan would work beautifully for a photo like this: 
Mercier Street > 1985 > No. 2 child's baptism
But, not for a photo like this...
"Care Bear" party for golfer Tom Watson's kid, year/address unknown but I think I was pregnant.
    See what I mean? I need a plan in which memory doesn't have to be a factor. But, I don't want to end up with hundreds of folders on my computer either. I think "tagging" may hold the key to the solution, but I don't know how that works exactly. Back to the drawing board...

5 comments:

A Fan said...

Sounds like a good plan to me for organizing "old" photos. Memory is less of an issue today we recently discovered. With the most recent software upgrades for iphone, ipad, macbook users -- when you take photo on your iphone or even transfer from another digital camera to your macbook or ipad photo file --- the very scary "icloud" automatically identifies and labels photos to the exact location where they were taken. The detail can be down to the city, state, county or district, neighborhood, etc. of where the photo was taken. It did this retroactively also after the software upgrade for photos we had previously taken and were still stored in our photos file. Nice, I guess, but a bit spooky if you ask me. "Big Brother is watching" Or should we say "icloud is watching" Yikes!

Colleen in A2 said...

I have been waiting for your post because I wanted to buy the device for my mother who has drawers and drawers full of old photos. Thanks for the update!

Cathy Hamilton said...

AF, I'm familiar with the way the cloud labels photos taken by the iphone, but didn't know it could do that retroactively to scanned photos on a chip. That WOULD be frightening.

A Fan said...

BG - yeah, we were surprised also. You're correct, in that identification/location of photos taken from actual iphone camera can be very detailed. But, when loaded some vacation photos off our digital camera to iPhoto on our mac it added some basic location labels that we didn't think we had input manually. Perhaps it takes clues from the iphone photos loaded also. Or picks up clues from the photo itself? Or we're just old and confused. :-) Always an option now. lol

Colleen in a said...

My mom LOVES her new scanner. Thanks fir the recommendation.

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