I’m always interested in how other people organise their photos when it comes to weekly scrapbooking. Today I’m sharing my process.

I’ve been using a program called Faststone Image Viewer (FS) for many years to manage photos and images. This program is really rich in features, yet it’s completely free.

I import all photos into a folder called ‘sort me’. Once my photos are imported I add them to the appropriate week folder. I downloaded Caylee Grey’s file structure which saved a lot of time.

Once I’ve added all the photos to a given week, I create a new folder within that week called ‘For PL’ and proceed to move all the photos I want to use into that folder. After I’ve finished editing, I save the photo with the weeks’ prefix in front into the ‘Print Me’ folder. I then move all the photos out of For PL back into their week folder and delete the For PL folder. This acts as a visual for where I am up to. As you can see I’m currently quite a few weeks behind.

I then upload photos for printing from the Print Me folder, which contains a sub-folder called ‘Printed’. Once I’ve picked photos up and put them into my album, I move them to Printed.

Aside from using Faststone to manage my photos, it has some really good features of it’s own. Double clicking a photo will open it full screen with a range of tools available; you can crop, resize, auto fix, adjust lighting, curves, levels and sharpness, clone, and fix red eye to name a few. There’s a draw board that allows you to add text to your photos, as well as shapes, speech bubbles, and watermarks. You can also open the photo in other programs from there, and often I’ll do basic edits in FS before sending it to Photoshop (PS) as some things are just faster to do in FS.

Many of the tools available in the full screen edit mode.

Another convenient feature is being able to drag and drop images from FS straight onto whatever I’m working on in PS. When I’m digi scrapping I’ll have FS open with my supplies, then when I need something I look for it in FS, then drag it to PS. You can drop it onto your existing canvas or onto a blank space which opens it. I find this process less time consuming that looking for and opening images in Photoshop. FS will also give you thumbnails of PSD’s which is something PS no longer does making it hard to identify templates. This process would be even more enhanced if I had two monitors as I could have on program per monitor instead of flitting back and forth.

Digital scrapbooking supplies in Faststone; I then drag and drop whatever I wish to use into Photoshop

Lastly, I use the batch processing tools a lot. I use batch processing for two main things; after I’ve edited all my photos I add 3% to the canvas to prevent borders and things being chopped off during printing, and to change the size and dpi for my web images.

So that’s how I sort my photos out. You might have a much easier way, but this works for me! Do you have any tips you would like to share? If you want to look at Faststone, their page is here. I am not affiliated with them, and do not benefit in any way if you choose to download the program.