Lost Photos

Morning sky from the back deck of My Beach House

I have been sick, sick, sick since the discovery in the spring that I have lost a file of photographs. I take a lot of photos. The next best thing to being at the beach is photos of when you were there! In April, when Maddie turned 16, I poured over hundreds of photos to make a slideshow of her life to show at her surprise party. It turned out so well.

While going through all those photos I came to the conclusion that I have no real system for filing photos both on my hard drive and uploaded off-site. I have photos on my Mac, on my desktop at the office, uploaded to Picasa and Flickr and none of them are in easy to find files. After looking through the photos for the slideshow I decided that I needed to decorate my office at work with my own photography instead of someone else's art and I went in search of pictures to use. I have two picture frames that have three prints of flowers in each one and the mat is in good condition.  I decided that I would take three of my sunrise photos for one frame and three of my sunset photos for the other. And I knew immediately that I wanted one of the sunsets to be of the abandoned houses in the Pamlico Sound that I took from Bodie Island.

It was September 2007, and I remember Maddie and Betsy and I rushing down the sandy road past the Bodie Island Lighthouse to get out by the water before the sun went down. I took a photo of a crab in the water that turned out beautifully and about 20 shots of the sun setting with these abandoned houses on stilts out in the sound. Gone. That whole vacation is gone. I've been searching and searching. I took the hard drive of my old desktop to a computer guy and he is working on locating and extracting all photo files. I'm praying that he finds it.

In the meantime, dear reader, I'm desperately seeking a system for filing my photos to avoid losing them. I don't know how this happened but I probably have 3000-4000 photos that need to be organized. And I have another couple thousand old photographs that I've sent out to be scanned. I'd like to have a filing system in place by the time they get back. One My Beach House goals for the future is to be more organized. It's much easier to relax and fully enjoy beach life when one's surroundings are not in chaos!
Looking for the most zen of systems and I welcome your suggestions.

Here's the criteria for photo organizing and archiving. It need to be simple. It should include keyword and date and possibly name if a person is involved. It should be a workable system on the desktop and exports to whatever site should maintain the filing system. Please send me your thoughts. I'll print them here so we can all benefit from the ideas. Thanks!