To keep track of what you have and more effectively share these memories, you need an approach to browse, organize and distribute the images in your ever-growing digital library. You need a central place to realize those images that currently feel stuck on your hard drive and to author those stories that are currently untold. I call this process life-building. It allows you to create a foundation and an approach on how you think about the organizing and a living library of work that you will create, author and share.

Let's begin your legacy...

> Organization - You are the shopkeeper. You need the fastest and most efficient framework to access, browse and author the inventory of media you will amass. The keywords you choose will define how your media will be organized and retrieved.

> Selection - You decide what is important. You need a criteria for making those keep/remove decisions when you craft your stories and build your memories both in-camera and on the computer.

> Automation - You will provoke swift automatic tasks that will save you time. These tasks can help you automatically organize, prioritize and author your memories, allowing you to integrate them into your daily schedule and become a more natural behavior.

> Distribution - You will author and share in multiple ways. Your living library will become a source to distribute a network of stories you tell to multiple audiences. From traditional scrapbooks to DVDs, the approach you take to distribute and share your memories will become the foundation for your social network.

> Preservation - You are the protector of your media. The legacy of this work will rely on your ability to protect and preserve it. You should create a method to store, secure and safeguard one of your most valuable assets you will ever create.

The thumbnail view in Windows XP gives you a hint of which images are inside that folder. By hovering your cursor over the thumbnail it will display information about the contents.

When I ask most people how they organize their folders, they just say, "I just throw them into My Pictures folder." There is a better way that is not too complicated and does not take up too much time. If you rely on file folders to both organize and retrieve your images, one way to do it is to create a simple hierarchy of folders, organized by date or by topic. I have seen variations done either way, but most of the people I have interviewed find that if they shoot a lot of images, the following organization seems to be the most efficient.

> Example 1: Organize Broadly by Date, Specific by topic - This is the file structure I use the most. It works for me, simply because I like a stronger emphasis on date than on topic when using folders. This is also a very flexible structure. In this model, there is a folder that represents year, month, and (sometimes) day. Each is a folder within the hierarchy. Depending on the amount of media I produce, the granularity may change. For example, sometimes I may only copy only two large photo sessions in a single month. Instead of choosing to add another layer of the hierarchy, I will just create a folder that relates the topic of the photos contained within it.

> Example 2: Organize Broadly by Topic, Specific by date - In this type of file structure, there is a series of broad topics organized by folder that are used at the top level. These topics are chosen specifically as recurring themes. They can be locations, places or people. This is a folder organized specifically to aide in retrieval. It is easier to retrieve IF you have named your folders correctly and placed the media correctly. I have some friends that use this model and love it. As the folders get deeper, so do the topics. The topics are then dated to distinguish between topics.

Imagine, for example, what it would be like to put all of your images into one big bucket. Imagine there was a tiny little Post-It Note attached to the back of each picture. On each post-it was written different attributes or characteristics of that image. The rules of the bucket required that each time you reached into it you needed to say what you were looking for. Every picture with a post-it on the back that had a match would immediately be put into your hand.

When images are captured with a digital camera, a series of information tags are also captured-like the Post-It Notes attached to the pictures in your bucket. This tagged information, called metadata, is inserted into the file that your camera outputs as a digital photo and follows it around. It starts with an accurate time-stamp by which the media was captured. From there, it may include any number of other characteristics about how the image and what kind of settings on the camera were part of capturing the image, such as the camera make and model, the time when the photo was shot, and the aperture settings.