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I’m suffering from digital media overload (DMO).

In the past few months, I’ve been going all digital and have encoded all of my CDs onto iTunes, and have even started recording my family’s VHS home movies onto DVD so I can keep them digitally. I have over 400 CDs, so this was a tedious task. But I’m tired of hauling around CDs and jewel cases and not having them available anywhere I want. Now, all my CDs are on my home server and my iPod.

iTunes organizes all my music and keeps track of where they are stored and makes it easy for me to access it at anytime.

But I’m having a lot of problems with pictures and videos. I like digital media; I take lots of photos and shoot video through my digital camera too. And that requires a lot of time to move files to my PC, rename files and organize them into folders. Who has the time to do this everyday? Maybe that’s why I’ve just been transferring photos into random folders on my computer–I just don’t have the time to organize everything.

Perhaps the problem is metadata. CDs have metadata built-in which makes it easy to create a music library. However, personal digital photos and movies are different. There’s no metadata. That means I have to review the photos, then rename files with something meaningful and organize them in folders. Forget about editing the photos–I definitely don’t have the time or expertise for that. Overall, that’s a lot of manual work to manage my digital media. Why isn’t there something like iTunes for my photos?

I’ve played around with Picasa, Google’s photo editing and organization software, but it’s not filling my needs. For example, it doesn’t integrate with Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo!), but with Google’s online Picasa site. That’s not good. I’ve chosen Flickr as my photo site and don’t want to change it now.

So what’s the best way to save, catalog and store digital photos and movies? How can I organize everything? By date? By tags? By event? By type of file? By location? I have no idea! Nothing makes sense to me right now.

Eventually, I want to post all my photos on Flickr, but I feel like I need to organize them on my PC first and get rid of my DMO.

So how do you organize your digital photos and home videos on your PC?

Photo courtesy of frumbert