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Jul
28
Written by:
host
7/28/2009 7:00 AM
 The number of digital photos you accumulate for ministry purposes can begin to grow quite large over time, making it increasingly difficult to find the photos you desire quickly. No one filing scheme works best for everyone, but here are a few tips to follow that will make finding photos easier down the road.
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Centralize your photos. If you're on a church staff, be sure all photos go into one location that is accessible by all church staff members. This saves time for everyone, and it's a good "Safe Sanctuaries" practice, too. If you're a volunteer, you still may wish to put all ministry-related photos on a church computer for historical and other purposes.
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Decide what your primary categories are. You may want to sort photos by year, for example, if you regularly put collections of photos together for graduates. Or, you may wish to organize your photos by ministry areas.
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Plan out sub categories. You may find making a mind map will help you to visualize your categories. Create as many levels as you will reasonably use.
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Use any tagging features available to you in your software. Tagging enables you to add searchable keywords to photos, such as "mission trip" or "youth choir" or the names of people in a photo. Keep tags short; you're better off splitting "youth group 2009" into two tags, for example. Usually, you can tag multiple photos at one time with a particular tag to save time.
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Use a special folder and/or tag to separate out photos that may not be used for publicity purposes because a parent has declined to give consent.
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Use face recognition software to quickly sort old and new photos by persons. This technology is now a standard feature in the latest version of iPhoto (Mac only), but I suspect it will become a common part of other software very soon.
- Consider whether or not you need to use a standard file naming system. Here's a helpful blog post that describes one individual's method. Batch renaming programs can be used to quickly rename your files.
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As you are going through your photos, be sure to delete any that are blurry, duplicates, or otherwise clearly unusable.
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Store ministry photos, purchased photos, and clip art in separate folders, each with their own categories and sub categories.
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While you're at it, be sure you have a backup of your photos and file structure, too.
~ Tim Gossett
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