I take all my own source photos for my work but there is the question – how do I get this to work so they are quickly and easily accessible?

My solution is to use photo boxes. I make cardboard dividers on which I put the botanical name, common name, distribution & flowering information plus anything else I think may be particularly relevant to that particular species. I have also generated a photo database using excel which I have a hard copy at hand with all the records of this information with cross references for botanical and common names so if I forget one I can still usually find it using the other! This all takes a fair bit of time like all filing but it makes life so much easier. I have the actual negatives filed in folders with names on each.

These days with digital photos they are all filed on the computer with back-up hard-drive and try to make cd/dvd backup disks as well. My fear is that with this digital phase we may actually end up losing many photos and not have all those wonderful ‘old’ historical photos I love looking at from years gone by.

I need to generate a new excel file with all of those digital photos yet but maybe on another wet weekend!

I think the biggest challenge is to keep up to date with the filing   thought that keeping computer files saves time but my experience is that you still have to take the time to keep things in order. As I know you all have been told a thousand times – always back up – your computer dies, or a hardrive and you lose everything. Best of intentions we all mean to do and we all make mistakes and think we’ll just fix that tomorrow.

Copyright – Lynette Weir