Dealing with Photo Overload

We've been home from California for almost a week--not quite, but almost. We had a blast! I'll share bits of the trip in future posts. Once I got past the jet lag, I jumped into photo overload. We have more than 1000 photos from the trip--I know, big surprise--NOT! I've spent many hours sifting through photos, organizing, and editing. It's a big job--but I managed to save myself some time before I even arrived home.
Tips for managing a ton of vacation/travel photos.
1. If at all possible, upload from your camera card to your laptop each and every day. If you absolutely can't do this, consider having a separate camera card for each day, or look for a photo service or kiosk that will put each day's photos on a thumbdrive or dvd/cd. This builds in a base organization system, and protects against lost photos.  

2. As soon as possible, quickly flip through your photos and delete those blurry, under/over exposed shots that you know you can't do anything with---you know the ones.

3. Make a folder for each event/location from your vacation. Put all of your photos in these categories, but keep them in date sub-folders i.e. We spent several days at Disneyland so my Disneyland folder has a sub-folder for each day. This helps automatically break your photos into chunks to handle. It also helps with story-telling. There are many photos that I might not know exactly what was going on if I didn't know which day it was taken.

4. Tag, tag, tag---use whatever photo organizing software you like, but tag those images. This will really be helpful if you have several people taking photos with different cameras. If you don't know how your software works, find an online tutorial. It might make you a little crazy now, but in the long run, your photos will thank you.  

5. Always keep the original image of any photos that you edit. There are a ton of reasons for doing so--a post on its own---so trust me for now.