I read [1] Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst (he writes the [2] Good Experience blog) recently. He shares many good ideas for managing all of the bits and bytes we must work with every day. The chapter titled “Managing Photos” is what motivated me to read the book and it offered clear and simple guidance:

1. Take many photos to increase your chance of getting a great shot.
2. Keep only the fabulous shots and the best one of near-duplicates. (This is the part of the process with which I struggle. I have trouble deleting pics of Reid looking cute or sad or thoughtful or whatever.)
3. Store those that make it past the rigorous vetting within a 2 level hierarchy of [year] and [month number - descriptor], for example, in a folder labelled 2008 there might be subfolders titled 01 general, 01 grandma joyce, 02 daycare, 02 general, 02 winterlude, etc.

The text that explains the method that I’ve summarized will motivate you to finally delete and organize your photos and then keep up with it. Hurst’s perspective on tagging photos and the complexity that we sometimes introduce in our quest to organize had me nodding.

[1] Bit Literacy also covered managing emails, to dos, media, and a variety of file handling tasks. If you take the time to read the whole book, you’ll have quite a few other ideas of things that will work for you as well.

View more [4] Works for me Wednesday posts at [5] Rocks in My Dryer or look at my [6] previous Works for me Wednesday entries.