If you’re like me, you may have taken tons and tons of digital photos with your trusty digital camera, but never took the time to organize them.

It’s certainly not a good idea to have thousands of photos lying in your hard drive totally disorganized. For one thing, it’s going to be very tough to find a specific photo for viewing purposes. So what can you do to put those photos into some semblance of order?

Bring your Photos into Photoshop Album
Import your pictures into Photoshop Album. If your pictures reside in your camera, then make sure you hook up the USB cable between the camera and computer. Then click on the Get Photos button with Photoshop Album. If your pictures are already in your computer’s hard drive, then click on From Files and Folders in the menu.

Tag your Photos
With your pictures imported into Photoshop Album, you can begin the tagging process. Tagging is a cool concept found in photo management software. What you do is to attach descriptive text called tags (e.g. ‘Uncle Joe’, ‘Robert’s Birthday’, ‘School Play’), to each photo in your collection. When you do this, you no longer need to worry about a picture’s filename, folder or date. All the need is the tag that you entered.

Move Your Photos to Appropriate Folders
Once you’ve tagged all your photos in Photoshop Album, it doesn’t matter where they reside in the computer’s hard drive. If you’ve just imported a new batch of photos, you can proceed to now move your digital photos to whichever folders you want. For me, I’d first rename any new photos in my ‘Unsorted Photos’ folder, then proceed to move them into the ‘Raw Photos’ folder.

Edit Your Photos If Necessary
You can perform basic image edits like rotation within Photoshop Album itself. Basic image editing functions like rotation, cropping and red-eye removal are readily available at the click of a button.

Backup All Your Photos Regularly
Within Photoshop Album, there is a function to regularly backup your entire photo catalog. All database information (in particular, tag information) will be backed up as well. You will want to get a CD burner, DVD burner or even an external hard drive to cater for this purpose.

Conclusion
Taking the time to organize and clean up you digital photo collection is a worthwhile investment. By tagging your photos properly, you’ll be able to retrieve images in a snap. No more sifting through folders and image files to locate that specific photo.