Whether you’re a blogger or not, chances are you have some photos around your house.  They may be in a variety of formats–digital, prints, slides, negatives–and doing something with them may be an overwhelming task.

At the I_Blog conference, we heard about the importance of having some type of organizational system for your photos.  After all, if you can’t find a photo when you need it, it doesn’t do you much good.

There are a variety of ways of organizing photos, and you have to choose what works for you, but even some basic organization, like naming your photos something other than “P1420883″ and putting them into folders by month or by year, can be helpful.  If you want to get more in-depth than that in organizing your digital photos, there are programs that can help.

Creative Memories sponsored my trip to I_Blog, and at their Saturday-evening scrapbooking party, they demonstrated not only the StoryBook Creator software, but also the Memory Manager piece.  Memory Manager is a software program that works in tandem with StoryBook Creator, but is a separate software purchase.  Memory Manager is where you can organize, edit, and prepare your photos for use, and StoryBook Creator is where you make them into something beautiful.

I’ve used Memory Manager in the past, and it does make it pretty easy to find your photos.  When you import pictures into the program, it will automatically sort them by date.  (If they happen to be old photos that are not time-stamped, like snapshots or slides you scanned, you can adjust the dates.  If you’re not sure of a particular date, you can get close, i.e. “1970′s” or “1989.”) Memory Manager also lets you sort into folders or boxes based on subject, similar to tagging or using keywords in other programs.  I went a little crazy with this at one time and had tags for every person in the photo, what event it was, where it was, etc.  The downside is that it takes a lot of time to do this sorting.  The benefit is that I could easily pull up a photo that had just my girls in it, or any of my kids’ birthdays, or family Christmas pictures, and so on.

Memory Manager also has the capacity for editing, so for those who don’t have the interest in learning a powerful program like Photoshop, editing can be accomplished without a huge learning curve.  My edits usually are basic, cropping and light adjustment, but more advanced capabilities are included in the software.

Some in our group liked that photos can be imported directly from Memory Manager into StoryBook Creator, without having to find the photos in the computer’s file directory.  You can look at the photos (in a size where you can actually see them) in Memory Manager, and then choose the ones you want and send them right to StoryBook Creator for use in an album.  The two pieces work very well together.  (I am, however, waiting for the day when Memory Manager will somehow remember which photos I’ve already used in StoryBook Creator albums so that I don’t use the same photos over and over.)

Memory Manager includes a backup component, although it was pointed out at the conference that you should have multiple copies and backups of your photos that encompass different drives and various physical locations.  (Four backups next to your desk won’t help in case of a tornado or fire that destroys your home.)

Creative Memories’ Memory Manager software is an easy-to-use tool for sorting and editing your photos.  You’ll still have to invest some time to do it, but if you are successful, you’ll never have to search for just the right photo again.

How do you keep track of your photos?  Do you have any tips for storing, organizing, or backing up your memories?

Creative Memories sponsored my trip to I_Blog in exchange for some blog posts that included their products.  As a long-time (11+ years) Creative Memories user, these posts reflect not only things learned at I_Blog, but my personal experience with their products.

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