Sorting the gang’s pics May 3, 2010

Now you’re home again and ready to put the whole picture set together.  Here’s a quick way to get them organised according to the time each photo was taken.

Start off by creating a folder called Originals and inside that create a folder for each of your photographers. Load their images into their own folders. Now create a new folder called Combined and copy each set of photos into it. There is every chance that some of the names will be the same so if your software alerts you to this, make sure you choose the rename file option so you don’t lose any images due to overwriting.

(Windows 7)

From here on, only work on images in the Combined folder.  If you mess things up, you can always go back and get new copies.

Next, sort the combined images by Date Taken (not Date Created – more on that another time).

In Windows you can add this field to your Details view by right clicking in the table titles row (1) and selecting  Take Taken (2) from the pop-up list. When this is coulmn is showing, click on ‘Date Taken’ in the top row to sort the files in ascending order, first taken to last taken.

That’s it for the short way to go about organising the gang’s photos.  The longer ways include adding the name of the photographer to the data properties of their images and renaming the collection for ease of sorting and adding to your final book or album.  I’ll address these in later posts.

(For more tips on photo taking, head over to SumScrapper for advice from professional photographer Sonya.)