Organize Your Digital Images

Hierarchical Folder Structure

Reserve a place on your hard drive for your pictures. Here's a suggestion: In the My Documents folder make a new folder and name it My Family or Family Album or something like that. If there are several generations of Smiths, create a folder for each. Great, great grandpa might have been Edwin B. Smith. Then name you folder Smith(EdwinB). Perhaps he had three children. With your cursor in your new Smith(EdwinB) folder, make new folders for each of his children Jones(Mary), Tom, Ted (or whatever their names are). Create folders for each of their children from within each of those folders. This method gives you a hierarchical file system. Help in creating new folders. Your folder structure might look something like this:     

My Family
Smith(EdwinB)
Jones(Mary) (who is Edwin Smith's child one)
Mary Jones' child one
Child of Mary Jones child one
Mary Jones child two
Tom Smith (who is Edwin Smith's child two)
Tom Smith's child one
Tom Smith child two
Tom Smith child three
Tom Smith child four
Ted Smith (who is Edwin Smith's child three)
Ted Smith's child one
Randolph(Carey) (another family branch)
Carey Randolph's child one
.
.
.

Not only do you want to organize your folders, but the files in your folders. See the next page for suggestions on a naming system your image files.