I’m curious to know your point of view.  For years, I have dumped the photos that I’ve taken with my digital devices into folders organized by some sort of common theme or location or time-frame and I’m finding it nearly impossible to properly categorize the pictures.  I mean, how do you sort them properly?  One picture has my mom in it, but it’s of her in her 20’s, and it’s in California.  I’ve traveled to California and I have pictures of me in Long Beach, but those are Beach pictures AND California pictures, and my mom happens to be in some of them too.  So is my dad.  I’m wearing red swim trunks, so not only am I swimming in the pictures in California with my mom, but my shorts are red, and they’re shorts, which I’ve worn to other places that I have photos of, which don’t have my mom, nor my dad, nor a beach in them.  What folder do they go in?

It’s a mess.  There’s no way to easily sort your pictures using file folders to make them effective.

Enter Picasa.

Tonight I am on the precipice of attempting something new.  Google does it with e-mail.  Why shouldn’t I do it with my images?  I mean, the new iOS7 is going to change the way our mobile photos are organized.  What implications will that have?!

What I’m thinking about doing is dumping ALL of my digital images into one folder on my computer, and create one other folder from which to draw on the best of those pictures.  One library of images, one library of favorites.  That’s it.  Do you think that makes sense?

This was all prompted by the fact that setting my MAC to change desktop backgrounds every 15 minutes or every 5 minutes caused the most retarded images that I have in one folder to be displayed.  Icons, logos, half-baked photoshopped crap, and anything you can imagine were becoming my desktop background.  How stupid.

My theory is this.  If I make a general rule of behavior that states, “All photos shall be managed through Picasa,” then ultimately, it doesn’t matter where the photos are stored.  It only matters that I properly tag and describe photos in Picasa.  But what if Picasa gets shut down some day?  They shut other things down.  (By they I mean the Google.)

Ugh…so frustrating.

How do you store and sort and file your digital images and why?