I don't usually get specific about tech topics since there are many people out there more qualified than me. But since photo taking and storage is ripe for having a "process," my favorite topic and one you probably expect me to talk about, I thought it made sense to dive into things a little.  Especially with the holidays coming up when we're going to be taking more photos than ever. Add that to the fact that more and more of us are using images rather than text in a lot of our marketing and communications because of its effectiveness, you quickly see why having a way to store and find our photos is important. After all, who hasn't spent time we can never get back looking for that one photo which then turns into a reminiscing trip that takes even more of our time!

The stats are hard to pinpoint, but it seems that the number of photos taken has doubled from 50 billion in 2006 to today. Yep, it is estimated that over 100 billion photos will be taken in 2015.  But even though we are amassing more and more images, our ability to find those photos hasn't really changed that much. Photo tagging has been around for a long, long time, but even those of us who use digital photos for work every day still have issues with storage and retrieval. Tagging has potential, but it takes discipline. Discipline that will reveal the true power of tags when it comes time to find your photos later and you no longer need to remember which folder you might have put something in. You only need to think of some aspect of the photo that you would have used in a tag. When you search on a tag, all the matching photos associated with that tag can be displayed. Tags are especially useful for identifying important things about the photos, even something as basic as the address of a property or names of the people in your photos. If you tag every picture with the names that belong to every face in the photo, you'll be able to locate all your pictures of a particular person in an instant. You can also combine and exclude tags to further refine your search results. For example, a search for "Suzi" and "puppy" will display all photos of Suzi with a puppy. Exclude "birthday" from the same search query and you'll find all photos of Suzi with a puppy except for those tagged "birthday."

Tagging represents a significant shift in the way digital data will be sorted, saved, searched and shared.  If you've been locked in to the old folder way of organizing digital photos, it's time to open your mind to the tagging concept. It doesn't mean the folder concept is going to go away, but I believe tagging is the way of the future and a valuable improvement to the hierarchical folder concept we've been using.  Tagging and rating in Microsoft Windows is easy.  You simply click on a photo and you'll see you can add tags and rate via "stars" right in the bottom status bar.  Nice and easy.

Tagging does have some disadvantages as well. With no hierarchy, the use of tags can become unwieldy. There is also a temptation to create a myriad of tags, so suddenly managing hundreds of tags becomes as much of a chore as managing the photos they're supposed to be helping you with! In the end, I think tags should be just one part of the solution to digital photo organization. Together with folders, captions and ratings, they can be a very powerful tool.

The idea of spending any significant amount of time in organizing and filing is probably making your hands sweat and for good reason - when you first start cataloging images there will be a lot to work through. You can be forgiven for wanting to put off naming, labeling, tagging and cataloging your images, but the sooner you start, the easier it will be. Using the basics on your computer or tablet, or even some of the more sophisticated but free applications out there, the process becomes easier the more you do. And the hope is you'll see photo storage and retrieval as just another workflow process that pays dividends.
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