Digital photography is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and you use it to document every detail of your family's lives. Good for you! But after the fun is over and you're staring at directory after directory of photo files from your camera, it's easy to get overwhelmed.

This quick lesson will teach you how to effectively manage that barrage of pictures, particularly how to name, archive and retrieve them. Your digital photos should be as easy to look through as a physical photo album, and by the time we're done, you'll be able to find any picture, any time.

Like irreplaceable physical objects, it's always a good idea to make sure you don't lose your photos by backing them up regularly somewhere besides your main computer.

Let's get started.

Take inventory

The first step when organizing anything, online or offline, is to take a look at your current state of affairs. Here are a few ways you can locate all your picture files.

Find out where your camera's default directory is. What does this mean? The default directory is where your camera puts your photos when you sync it up with your computer. This location varies based on the software that comes with your camera. In Windows® Vista, check the following folders:

• Pictures
• Documents
• C:\Users\<username>\Downloads

If your pictures aren't there, look in your camera's folder under C:\Program Files\XXXXX, where you replace the X's with the name of your camera's proprietary software.

If you still think you're missing photos, you can use Windows search to find them. In Windows XP®:

1. Click Start > Search. You'll see the Windows Search screen.
2. Select Pictures from the Other drop-down box.
3. Enter the search term in the Windows Search window.
4. To find all files marked .jpg, for example, enter *.jpg in the File Name field, as shown in Figure 1. This will find all the image files ending in .jpg on your computer, which may return hundreds of results, only some of which will be useful.

Figure 1: Search for image files in Windows XP Search.

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If you still can't find photos you know you have, try searching for different file extensions, such as *.gif, *.tiff or *.png. We'll discuss what these file extensions mean in a later section.

In Windows® Vista, the process is similar:

1. Click the Windows button in the bottom right instead of Start.
2. Since you're performing an advanced search, click Search on the right side of the menu. This brings up the Windows Search function.
3. Continue as you would with Windows XP above, using *.jpg, etc., in the search bar to the upper right. The results are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Search for images in Windows Vista.

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Once you've found all your photo files, click through them to get an idea of just what you have. You might find pictures of birthdays, holidays and vacations from long ago that you'd forgotten you had.

By now you should have an idea of the scope of your organizational task. This is a good time to hunker down and go through each picture to delete ones that are overexposed, too dark or suffer from some other technical issue.

Next up, we'll talk about naming schemes: how a camera names your picture files, and how you can re-name them into something usable.