Foo - This has to stop!

The sheer volume of family pics on this computah has become unmanageable by traditional methods. My pics folder is now 26.7Gb in size and contains over 13k pictures. Finding a photo is like finding a needle in a haystack. This has to be resolved.

I know this place is vibrant with photography experts. Please give me some tools to organize this madness...

I'm installing picasa now. But I have the feeling that's not what I need.

Folders are your friend, Rube. Create a folder named for the event or location and month/year that the photos were taken when you save the photos to your computer. Also, I have a sizable external drive where I archive older photos so I can remove them from the computer drive. Again, using folders named by event/location & dated.

^^What she said.^^

And take the time in the future to delete or don't transfer duplicate shots.

As a hobby photographer, I can easily second the above recommendation: folders. I have all of mine in chronological order, simply by starting their names with a year-month-day format before the event or location name. If I need to find something from last year, all of my 2011 folders are together, in order of month and day. If there are simply too many to feel reasonable in one folder, adding am or pm to split it in half (before the event title, after the date) continues to keep things in correct chronological order. Of course there are myriad ways of doing this; this is only my personal method.

As for archiving, I recommend at least two back-up methods for everything important. A dropped hard drive is easily ruined, and I've lost my share of 'everything's in the past. Burnable discs deteriorate after a few years, depending on environment and quality (both of disc and burn), so these don't last forever either. Redundancy at least helps keep a reliable copy in existence while another may be damaged or lost.

The sheer volume of family pics on this computah has become unmanageable by traditional methods. My pics folder is now 26.7Gb in size and contains over 13k pictures. Finding a photo is like finding a needle in a haystack. This has to be resolved.

I know this place is vibrant with photography experts. Please give me some tools to organize this madness...

I'm installing picasa now. But I have the feeling that's not what I need.

Get a Mac. They have exceptional photo organizing capabilities via iPhoto.

Actually, picasa will be of tremendous help, given time. The Facial recognition will be a GREAT help(once trained).

Trying to put an entire Rubester civilization photo documentary into an electronic shoebox.

Easier to put Rosie O Donnel in a string bikini.

Just delete 'em all. You'll never do anything with 'em anyways.

Folders + good storage. We have a Linksys NAS100 here, but a Buffalo TeraStation sort-of-a-thing will do.
\\nas\stuff\pictures\YYYY\YYYYDDMM-(Event or content)

Been using this system since 2003. The 2001-2002 and earlier pics are in a slightly different folder naming format and there was some 8+3 truncation in there somewhere, but it's a very reliable system.

But I was trying to remember today to remember in which trip back east to the inlaws' we went to Staten Island and I had pics of the National Guard Armory (my dad likes tanks). This system won't help your memory. :) Eventually, I found the Christmas of '06 trip.

But if you are crazy, you could use ResourceSpace on the *AMP server of your choosing. It is free.

Thx foo ... I've doing religious folder dating for some years now (Ex: Canoe-Trip-2012_06-05-2012). Is the old folders that are all messed up and need to be organized. It would be nice to have a software where I could view them all and just spend a few days adding "tags". I saw the picasa face recognition, looks useful. Haven't really used it yet, it reports 7000+ faces!. Mostly repeated people.

The storage is good. An 8tb array home-brew with very good fault tolerance. Could be better, but it serves. Plus monthly religious backups of the pictures into an external USB drive.

When I posted I was trying to find a picture of myself back in 1991, posing with a telephone table I had made. I gave up, couldn't find it. Maybe it's among the photos I haven't scanned yet.

i have a 32 gig card in my camera .i know for sure how pics can pile up

Heh, last time I counted (two years ago), my wife and I had over 18k photos on my computer (which are backed up off-site by the way--have you been doing that, Rube?). I use folders. Lots of folders. But I started the process when I started taking photos. Putting all those photos into folders now would seem hopeless!