• When taking photos, be sure to set the resolution high, then back up far enough on your subject that no cropping occurs.
• Remove photos often from your camera to prevent it from becoming an overwhelming task.
• When removing photos from a camera, or copying from another source, take the time to either tag, or at least create sub-folders to separate different events.
• If sharing your photos with others, use an easy to use online service such as Flickr, Picasa, or allow us to set up a ZenPhoto site or other cms based site for you.
• When uploading photos, only upload the ones that you feel will be useful and choose the best of duplicates rather than uploading them all.
• Before uploading, resize your images for the web, this will save you much time in uploading, but also make the photos ready for website use. You should keep the original in a corresponding folder on your computer for print use. form more information about resizing, you can see our blog post “How to optimize photos for the web or email“
• While uploading, or immediately afterward, tag your photos and add captions. This is something we have seen over and over where a client uploads a ton of photos, thinking I’ll tag them later and then never do. It is better to upload a smaller set of useful photos than an unruly bunch that are not.
• Tagging is what makes the photos useful. Create many tags, but try to use a consistent system for tagging (for example if you used a tag ‘bird’ be careful not to tag others ‘birds’ but rather use ‘birds’ even for singular items).

Taking some time to organize photos will save a lot of time later on when you want to start using these photos. Contact us if you would like more information on photo management systems that can be installed on your website.

To accomplish this goal, I have started working with a content management system called Zenphoto.

Zen strives to be simple and user friendly. Uploads, gallery management, tagging and categorizing are all very intuitive and could be figured out just by browsing the administrator panel. There are several themes available through Zenphoto’s website, as well as plugins for extending the function of your website.

This project is both a blog and a gallery, so I am using Zenphoto alongside WordPress to make this happen. WordPress has a great plugin that links the two admin control panels together. This way I can get to the back end of Zenphoto from a link in WordPress. It is also possible to fully integrate the two sites on the front end, though this is not the goal of my project.

In my experience, Zenphoto lives up to its philosophy, “Simpler is better.” So if you, like many people, have a large collection of digital images that you would like to make the main theme of your website, I’d recommend considering Zenphoto as your primary or secondary content management system.