How to Organize Your Digital Photos (for detailed organizers)

Digital cameras really haven’t been around that long, but with the amount of photos that we’ve accumulated over the last two decades, you’d think that we’ve been using them forever!

And now with our phones becoming our primary photo-taking device, the problem keeps growing — how do we keep TENS (or HUNDREDS?!) of thousands of photos organized and ever hope to find them again!?

There is no easy solution, especially if you didn’t start with a system and want to try and bring some order to your existing photos.

But if you set up a simple system going forward and maintain it regularly, it is possible to create a sense of order to your digital photos and make them easy to find.

Know your organizing style

Understanding how you organize is key to setting up a system for your photos that will actually work for you.

If you haven’t already taken the Clutterbug quiz, start here! It’s totally free and it will help you understand how you organize best.

My organizing style is micro and visual, which means that my Clutterbug is a Bee (Cas says I’m a Bee on steroids… she isn’t wrong😉).

I expect that this system would also work for Crickets (they like details but prefer things to be hidden).

If you’re a macro organizer (Ladybug or Butterfly), maintaining the system that I’m going to recommend would probably be some form of cruel torture. You need big categories, so take this as a suggestion only! You might just want to create folders with the year, and maybe add a folder for each month, then throw everything into one place. Don’t worry about setting up detailed folders by events!

How it works

When I got my first digital camera in 2006, I instinctively set up this system from the beginning to manage all my photos and it has worked wonderfully.

Name any photo that you want me to find that I’ve ever taken, and I can probably find it in 30 seconds or less.

Just a note: This is the system that I have set up on my laptop (and have backed up in many places) and I have taken almost all my photos with a point & shoot or DSLR. This system would probably also work on your phone, but I haven’t tried that myself.

So whether you want to set up a system going forward, or have the ambition to go back and organize years’-worth of photos, this is what I recommend!

STEP 1: Create folders by year

My first folder, 1980-2003, is broad because digital photography wasn’t a thing at that point. Anything stored here has been scanned from a print, and there really aren’t that many of them.

After that I labelled my folders by the school year because it made more sense to think in those terms at that point.

So 2004-2005 contains photos from September 2004 to August 2005, 2005-2006 has photos from September 2005 to August 2006, and so on.

Since the school year is no longer relevant in my own life, I’ve switched to labeling folders by the calendar year from January to December instead.

I also added a few extra folders by topic that are key areas of my life.

STEP 2: Create a folder for each separate event

Within each annual folder I create a folder for each separate event and label it with the date YYYY-MM-DD and then a comma and brief description of what’s in that folder.

This way you can see at a glance everything that took place that year, and if you label the date the same way every time, the folders will always be in chronological order. As long as you have a rough idea of the date that an event took place, you’ll be able to find it really quickly.

If there are two different events that happen on the same day, I’ll create a separate folder for each and label accordingly.

STEP 3: Move your photos into the designated folder

And voila, done!

STEP 4: Copy key photos to extra folders

If the photos contain something that’s one of the topics of my specialized folders, like cartwheels, I will also copy those specific photos into there as well so I can find them easily in two places.

STEP 5: Maintain!!

Yes, organizing photos like this can be a bit tedious, and you have to be consistent with it, or it will be almost impossible to catch up.

But for me and my brain, it’s worth it!

So that is my detailed system of photo organization. There are certainly many other ways you could do it, but I’ve found that this works really well for me, and it’s a topic that comes up often in our Minimal Mom Members Facebook Group.

If you’re overwhelmed with digital photos, I hope this helps give you ideas to make it less daunting.

If you have other systems or resources that have worked for you for digital photo organization, please share in the comments below. It might help someone else out!

Happy organizing!