Digital Scrapbookers – Say goodbye to old friends

What I love about following other bloggers is that sometimes the most innocent of statements can strike such a profound chord in me.  And I had that happen today.  Our good friend Jennifer Wilson at Simple Scrapper was doing a post on spring cleaning your photo library and she said:

“Delete liberally – …, but its sometimes easier to part with photos after time has passed.”

Wow.

Is that ever true!

I know when I look through old pictures getting ready to scrap, whether digital or traditional, I look at a lot of them and think “Now why did I save that one – it’s not that good…”

But at the time I felt they were important enough to keep… there had to be some reason…

But now all they are doing is cluttering up our hard drives and wasting space!  Now Jenn and I are big advocates of “tagging” your pictures to find them latter.  Tagging is assigning a few keywords to each pictures using software that will allow you to search for that keyword as some latter date.  The tags travel with the digital picture – they are actually written into the file itself.  We like using Windows LIVE Photo Gallery.  Now Notice I capitalized LIVE – most Window machines come with Windows Photo Gallery – you don’t want that.  You want to go to Windows Live and download it.  (It’s free.)  Now I am going to cover how to use it in a blog post next week but the reasons we like it are:

• It’s fast at creating the thumbnails to view your pictures and fast at retrieving the pictures once you search for something.
• You can drag-and-drop the pictures directly to other folders or directly into Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to open them.
• It’s really good at what it does and it’s Free.  Free’s good.  Very Good.

Now why did I save that one….

What do you use to keep track of your photos? And do you delete those ones you don’t need? Let me know by leaving a comment.