Beginning Again

After a year off, I have decided to continue posting on my blog. I had gotten burned out, trying to come up with something interesting every day. Perhaps I won't try so hard. I think it will be more intermittent. I don't think I want to try to make it a daily task. I'll just try to take my own advice and take it one day at a time. I had been posting comments on Facebook, which is probably not the proper venue for posting these types of photos and commentary.

It is funny how a record of your photographs - if you take enough of them - can be very much like keeping a diary. Except in my mind, it may be even better when you consider that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

With cellphone pictures being so ubiquitous, I would think more people will begin to realize how true this is.

With that in mind, I offer this tip. I have found that the easiest way to (digitally) organize my photographs is simply by date. I have folders for each year in which are twelve more folders for each month. By entitling them with the year, then the month ("2014-09," for example), the computer will put them in proper chronological order. If you title them the other way around (09-2014) it will not put them in proper order.

To use some other system where you have to re-title each photograph - even in batches - is too cumbersome and time consuming to my way of thinking. I use a program (Adobe Lightroom) which can add keywords to the original picture file in the exif data, so it is relatively fast to find a particular photo by searching for a word. I currently have sixty-eight thousand photos, so looking for a specific photograph and searching "by hand" could be a BIG time waster.

If you are taking photographs on a daily basis - even if you don't consider yourself a "photographer," I would suggest you purchase Lightroom. It is a database program. It does not store your photographs; it stores information about your photographs and where to locate them. Having used it since it's introduction, I can recommend it without hesitation. I don't know what I would do if I didn't 

have this program to organize photographs. It would simply be unmanageable.