If you’re like most people, you probably have thousands of digital photos stored on a computer or hard drive but have you ever been searching for that one photo and the few minutes you thought it would take to find it turns into an hour?

Top 3 tips for organizing your digital photos

Taking the time to develop a system that will help you better organize your photos will end up saving you hours in the future. Here are some helpful tips to get you started:

1. Check your camera’s settings. By making sure that your camera has the correct date and time setup, organizing your photos will be a lot easier now and in the future. With the correct dates and times in place, the right groups of photos will show up alongside each other, making it easier to save into specific folders.
2. Do a clean-up. If you’re generally a happy snapper, it might be time to set a few hours aside and carefully go through your photos and get rid of the images that are out of focus or aren’t of anything significant. This exercise will help you get organized and free up some space on your devices.
3. Start with the year. In order to really get organized, you’re going to need to start creating some folders on your computer. Start with a folder for a specific year and create folders for each of the 12 months within it. You can now create folders within each month folder that speak to different events, vacations or impromptu pet photo sessions that took place during those months. For example, if you went on a skiing trip in January 2015, your folder structure would be: 2015 > January > Family Ski Trip. This folder structure will make it much easier to find your favorite memories.

It’s also important to download and create backups of your photos on a regular basis. You always want a second copy of your most precious memories as those photos are something that you’ll never be able to get back should your computer or hard drive crash.