Organizing your disney photos

[123SA]

How do you organize your photos?

I just finished unloading my photos onto the computer -- honestly, I have over 1000, plus 200+ on the disney photopass CD. We were at WDW 11/30 --12/11. SO whwere to start? Of course there are duplicates and some that aren't any good.

Last trip, I ended up printing them all (4x6) so I could visualize what I wanted in the album. Then I sketched out my pages (2 albums worth) and re-printed if I needed to crop or edit a photo, or enlarge or shrink it.

Why this won't work this time -- besides the sheer number of them, we met Jasmine (for example) so many different times, I think it would be a nightmare to go back to the computer and figure out which photo I decided was the best one and then print it to the size I want.

On the other hand, I don't like the idea of flipping through the diffferent files on the computer to find all of the Jasmine photos and then decide the best one based on the computer view.

Any suggestions? I am overwhelmed and I haven't even looked at all of my photos yet!!!

 

[PoohBearLovinMama]

What about instead of printing out all of your photos at once, picking a general theme and printing out just those photos in your theme. Like all of MK or all the Character meetings. Then when you get done with those, print out another theme and so on until your finished.

I do usually go thru all my photos on my computer, though. I usually see a basic sort of page while going thru them. Like "My Dd's meeting Cinderella" or "Before and After Splash Mtn" type of pages. After I'm done I get those pictures printed out. Then, when I get my photos back, I have a general idea of which photos go together and what I wanted to do with them.

HTH!

 

[huge mickey fan]

I also have hundreds of photos to start working with. I did zoom and crop before printing them out. Now I will sort them by Day, then Park then Land. Once they are grouped together I can see what I have to work with and I can pick out paper or stickers to match. If you don't want to print them all at a time then put them on a CD and take them off your computer and put them back on when you need to use that disc. That way you don't have to tie up your computer with all the photos.

 

[JandJ]

Do you by any chance have Photoshop? You can sort by face recognition and then look at all of the Jasmine (or anything else) photos all on one page. That will make it easier to pick the best one. I also use Picasa (a free download through Google) and have found that to be great when organizing.

Also, if you have a lot of one character or theme from different days/parks (like Jasmine) how about a Jasmine page and a few of the best photos with her all on one page? BTW - I am usually a strict chronological scrapbooker so for me to even suggest that is amazing

 

[Davids-Coco]

I usually print a contact sheet on cheap photo paper (with image name) and then plan out the album... then only print the ones I want.

 

[Yzerbear19]

I usually go through mine in Photoshop, then save the ones I want to use to a new folder and group them that way. For example, there might be a folder of Jasmine photos, castle photos, etc. I upload all the ones I want or burn them to a CD to have them printed. If while I'm working on the book I decide I need another shot, I just print that one. I think I would go broke if I printed all the pictures I've taken! It also helps to download them each day, that way all that day's photos are grouped together.

 

[new_mommy]

I use Creative Memories Memory Manager. It is awesome for sorting photos. It also allows you to "journal" about each one while it's fresh so if you don't get to printing or making an album right away, you don't lose the memory. I would also go through and delete the ones that aren't very good. No need to have crummy ones adding to the confusion! Good luck!

 

[DisneyCowgirl]

I agree with the suggestion to delete the not-so-good ones. I finally learned that this is the key to my organization. This morning I went through the 273 Christmas pictures we took. On the first pass, I immediately deleted all the ones that would be characterized as "bad." That got rid of 50 or so. On the second pass, I looked at the ones where there were several taken a few seconds apart and deleted the ones that were not nearly as good as the others. That got rid of another 20 or so.

After that, I put my favorites into folders, but did not delete any others.

One thing about this is, it took some time, but now I know what pictures I have and it was easy to pick my favorites after going through them so many times.

I do have iPhoto so I can easily look at all the pics at once too. If I had to open each pic individually to look at them, this plan would not work so great.

 

[BuzzBelleMom]

I also have hundreds of photos to start working with. I did zoom and crop before printing them out. Now I will sort them by Day, then Park then Land. Once they are grouped together I can see what I have to work with and I can pick out paper or stickers to match. don't have to .

I do the same. Day, Park, land. I then I break them down even more: characters, rides, etc. I can get rather anal. Makes it easier to find them. If I need the photo of Belle with Beast, I know to look in the folder of just those two on the computer, in the Epcot folder. And I leave them there, DH knows me and has lots of space for photos. He also backs up the photos a few times a year. I only print out the photos when I need them, so that they don't get damaged.

 

[loopner67]

Wow, what an overwhelming task, huh?

I like two suggestions already made.... deleting out bad photos (if that's even possible) and printing pictures in stages (maybe by land?).

I printed all of mine from last March's trip and don't think I will actually scrap them all. It's not economical to keep printing all my pictures when I'm not going to use them all.

I'd love to hear an update on what you do and how you get rolling on your pages. Good luck.

 

[123SA]

Here's my update on what I have done so far.

I decided not to print out the 1500 photos (I underestimated the amount!!)

My photos were taken on 2 different cameras, plus photopass. So when they all got loaded onto the computer... it makes no sense. They are not in date order because of the different cameras. Each camera is in date order.

I viewed each photo. Deleted the obvious ones, but did not yet decide whether the 1st or 2nd photo of the same situation is the better one. When I get to that I will delete more.

Then I made an excel spreadsheet. I made columns for:
1. file name-- I didn't move any of the photos around or rename them. I decided that was too time consuming.
2. image number
3. I made codes for the people in the photo. ie A= DD6 & DS4, B=DH,DD6,DS4, C=DS4 & Dh etc
4. Character
5. ride
6. location/event i.e. Adventureland or Holly Day Parade
7. park
8. brief description -- only if not obvious, no description for character photos, sometimes the description was really a comment -- I really like this photo
9. orientation of the photo -- portrait or landscape ( this is important to me in the planning process)
10. date the photo was taken

This took hours. Now my plan is to use the sort function to help in planning pages. If I want to do a Buzz page, I can sort on the character column and find out where all of my Buzz photos are, or I can sort by date, location etc.

Before I left for the trip, I made 8x8 pages for the characters to sign, for each of my children. The sort function really helped with finding the photos I needed to print for these albums.

I hope this works out. As I noted before, for the last trip I was able to look at the actual photos to plan out my album. I really liked doing it this way. If I am not having success with my current plan, I'll take another shot at deleting photos, separate out events that I have a ton of photos for (BB Boutique, MVMCP parade etc.) and then find the cheapest prints I can to print.

They won't all go to waste -- DD6 has been scrapping using the leftover photos from the May 2005 trip!

 

[mickey8888]

I usually print a contact sheet on cheap photo paper (with image name) and then plan out the album... then only print the ones I want.

Great idea! Love this idea!!!

 

[123SA]

What is a contact sheet?

 

[klmall]

I've been to WDW ten times with photos and memorabilia for at least 9 of those trips (since 1990). I'm still scanning in three of the earliest trips and of course, walking down "memory lane" as I scan! I have hundreds and hundreds of pre-digital photos.

I'm in this mess because I was good about carefully removing these photos from older, non-archival safe scrapbooks. What a mess....

My thoughts so far for new scrapbooks are these possibilities:
1) Go the straight "trip by trip" route (I am a linear scrapbooker; simple layouts, embellishments, journalling and NO award-winning 'magazine ad' pages).

OR

2) Massively re-organize and come up with some themes like "First Trip special things" and "Spaceship Earth over the years" and "Hotels we stayed At" and "Dining Out at WDW" and "Parades". This would be confusing to set up and would take forever but could be very good when finished and each theme could fill a section of a scrapbook or in some cases a whole scrapbook but the whole trip perspective would be lost!

Right now I am leaning toward #1.

Any thoughts?

 

[tgmousechick]

I'm going to guess it's the equivalent of an index print- small versions of the photos on a single print or sheet.

What is a contact sheet?

This is my SOP with my photos- I generate thumbnail (PhotoImpression's name for these) print for each of my folders, and use those in association with my sketch books to plan pages.

My everyday pics are organized by month, then special event, if necessary.

My 350 Disney pics (small in comparison, I know), are organized by Park, date, and attraction/character. Our 2006 Trip will yield a chronological album, so this makes the most sense for this sorting method.

 

[mickey8888]

A contact sheet is were you print out the index of your pictures so you can see what you have. Today I stayed home in bed with the stomache bug. DH was kind enough to do contact sheets of our pics for me. I grabbed the laptop and scanned two peas for Layout ideas grabed a note book and made sketches of LO's and ideas I had. When I had a page idea I went through the contact sheet found pics that would work with my idea cut them out and glued out to my sketch. This helped I have several page ideas know. Before my creative wheels weren't spinning. Thanks for the great idea.

 

[Fran98765]

I guess I'm different then everyone else. I have all of my photos dated chronologically since 1998. Going back farther makes my head hurt and I'm not looking forward to that task, but someday I will. I have a 2nd hard drive which was put in specifically to house all these photos. I back them up on CDs periodically (but not often enough!)

To keep them chronological, I changed the file names of them all to remain in correct order. I start with the year, then month with a preceeding alpha (a-l) then the date and a, b, c etc for the daily photos. The letters get really long for special events, like being at disney, I have some that go to zzzz.

If this seems confusing, my file folder for Sept 06 would look like this:

Each year is separated and I have the years separated by months as well (on the left column). On the right side are the files in order. Usually I have them as thumbnails so I can see the images at a glance so I can find a specific them easier. We arrived at WDW on the 27th, and didn't take many pics that month until WDW, but after the 27th there were tons. Some days have lots of letters shown below:

The 2006 is the year. Next comes the month and I preceed that with an alpha a for jan, b for feb,... i for sept, etc. That keeps the month in the correct chronological order. Next comes the date, 01, 02 ... 31. Then I use another alpha for each day starting at a-z and if I have more then 26 pics on a day, which is common at Disney, I then do za, zb, etc, then zza, zzza, etc. On some of those wacky photo days, I have gotten to 4 alphas for the day.

This keeps everything in perfect chronological order. I also have a website of all my Disney vacations (in sig) and on the menu for each vacation, I put which parks/resorts have pictures for each day, so if I'm specifically looking for resort pics from my 2005 trip, I would just look there and know what day to look on. Or I would just browse through windows explorer in the correct month, since I have them all as thumbnails.

It took a long time to set everything up this way, but I can find any photo extremely quickly. I do my scrapbooking digitally now, and it makes it a breeze to find a photo that I want to do on a LO.