More house work isn't something many of us take on willingly. Or quietly. Especially when it isn't even making our actual house liveable. Having a house with things kept wherever they happen to be dropped makes it impossible to find anything. The kid's bedroom is not a good place to keep power tools. Storing fresh vegetables in the bathroom doesn't make much sense either. Our online life needs housekeeping too and it make our online world liveable. It is easy to keep our online stuff scattered everywhere or just in one big heap.
Pictures use to be something physical that we put in albums to preserve because they were fragile and expensive. Now that they are a quick snap away on our phones we have hundreds or thousands of photos every year. This is now a big jumbled mess of images with pictures from vacation next to hundreds of pet pictures trying to get a good shot of the dog park. Getting them organized is necessary just to find anything without flipping through everything.
This is where putting some thought before you start can make you photo galleries useful. It is tempting to just let the pictures flow together and be grouped by the date they were taken because it is somewhat automatic. That's fine if you remember exactly when that day at the park happened last summer or was it the summer before.
Unless you are a genius at remembering dates a better way is needed to get everything in order. I like to start with a small number of broad categories that are important to me. Things like kids, pets, friends, vacations, inspirations or hobbies are good places to start. It is best if these categories will break your pics into each web photo album that end up close in size. If you find that one album is way bigger than the others, break it up into a few more categories.
You can repeat this again for each of the broad labels as well. You don't want to get carried away and have only one picture at the end of each sub-label. I find something even up to ten categories wide at the top but no more than three level deep is good. So something like Inspiration -> Home -> Kitchen is deep enough. Using dates on the lowest level makes sense then like Vacation -> Beach -> August 2010. That keeps the website photo album for pets from August 2010 separate from that fabulous night out with the girls from August 2010.
The other important part of housekeeping for your online photos is to delete. We all like to take a bunch of pictures of our favourite things. Not all of those quick snaps are good pictures. They might be blurred or cutting off half of someone's head. We just take another picture, but at the time, sending the bad one to the trash may not happen. There is no reason to keep those photos. While you are organizing things is a good time to be brutal and trim the collection.
Pictures use to be something physical that we put in albums to preserve because they were fragile and expensive. Now that they are a quick snap away on our phones we have hundreds or thousands of photos every year. This is now a big jumbled mess of images with pictures from vacation next to hundreds of pet pictures trying to get a good shot of the dog park. Getting them organized is necessary just to find anything without flipping through everything.
This is where putting some thought before you start can make you photo galleries useful. It is tempting to just let the pictures flow together and be grouped by the date they were taken because it is somewhat automatic. That's fine if you remember exactly when that day at the park happened last summer or was it the summer before.
Unless you are a genius at remembering dates a better way is needed to get everything in order. I like to start with a small number of broad categories that are important to me. Things like kids, pets, friends, vacations, inspirations or hobbies are good places to start. It is best if these categories will break your pics into each web photo album that end up close in size. If you find that one album is way bigger than the others, break it up into a few more categories.
You can repeat this again for each of the broad labels as well. You don't want to get carried away and have only one picture at the end of each sub-label. I find something even up to ten categories wide at the top but no more than three level deep is good. So something like Inspiration -> Home -> Kitchen is deep enough. Using dates on the lowest level makes sense then like Vacation -> Beach -> August 2010. That keeps the website photo album for pets from August 2010 separate from that fabulous night out with the girls from August 2010.
The other important part of housekeeping for your online photos is to delete. We all like to take a bunch of pictures of our favourite things. Not all of those quick snaps are good pictures. They might be blurred or cutting off half of someone's head. We just take another picture, but at the time, sending the bad one to the trash may not happen. There is no reason to keep those photos. While you are organizing things is a good time to be brutal and trim the collection.
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