Organizing Your Digital Images for Content Creation
As a content creator you probably spend a good bit of time searching for and using the best digital images you can find to match your unique content. Once you’ve been at it for a few years you might come to realize that your digital images need organizing and decluttering. Even if you use a digital hub like a Seagate portable hard drive (affiliate link) as the one place you hold all your digital images, you’ve still got to keep your images organized and updated.
Your mission of decluttering and organizing your images for quick access as you create content has several goals.
- Keep useful images at your finger tips to save time when creating content.
- Identify your own images and have them edited and ready for use.
- Keep adequate records about the stock photos you have paid a fee to use, what rights you have, and where you have used stock photos.
I’ve changed how I organize my digital images several times over the years. Today I’ll share with you my step by step system for keeping my images easy to find. 
One decision I made is to keep a separate folder or digital hub for images to be used in content creation. If some of those are my own photos (and many are) that image will also be stored in with my personal image library. In this way I can keep a much smaller digital folder or photo hub for business and a larger one that is totally separate for my personal images.
TIP: If you are a Canva Pro user I know that it is very tempting to rely solely on the images available in Canva. You do a search for a particular topic and dozens or hundreds of options pop up. It’s quick and easy and doesn’t require you to organize your own images. The big “but” is that these images are used by thousands of other people. They are not unique to you. So their effect is not as robust as it could be. If you want to explore using Canva Pro for its graphic design you can check it out using my affiliate link.
Related article
If you want to know more about how to make the effect of your images robust and memorable check out this article on that topic.
Two types of digital images you own the rights to use
If you’re like me you probably have two types of images you can use freely in your content (free or paid content).
- Stock photos you have purchased the rights to use (make sure that includes the use of them in your paid products)
- Your own images you’ve taken to use in content creation.
The Steps to Organize and Decluttering Images to use in Content Creation
Step One: If you have and use both types my first suggestion is to create a file called something like “Image Library” and within that create two subfiles. One for “My Images for Content Creation” and one for “Stock Photo Images for Content Creation.” You can use this framework whether you are keeping the files on your own hard drive or in a stand alone digital hub. If you are keeping your images in the cloud you will still be able to organize them in some basic way, depending on which cloud you’re using.
TIP: I used to have a folder for each year since I personally take a lot of photos, particularly of our travels. But that’s not really useful. You might use a wonderful image over and over again for years and it’s not important when it was taken. Plus, it’s hard to remember which year the photo was made when you are searching for it by date. Most digital images have a date taken in their digital information about that image, so it’s not really necessary to sort by year. The exception might be if you are creating content year on year for something like a special event and you need easy access to historical images of that event for new content each year.
While I recommend keeping your own images separate from the stock photos you’ve purchased, you can create topic folders that are the same. As an example I might have the topic “beach picnics” under both stock and personal images.
I recommend organizing your personal images first, because those are almost always the best images for you to use.
Step Two:
- Pull in 20 of your own images at a time to work with (don’t overwhelm yourself with hundreds or thousands at once).
- For each image make any edits in your photo editing software.
- Straighten the horizon
- Balance the light
- Enhance the color if need be
- Crop the image if need be
- Change the photo’s file name to something useful to you. It could be by location or by topic.
- If you are able it makes sense to use tags on the image. You can tag the location, the year, a person’s name, and/or the topic for that photo. This takes a minute but leads to a lot more ease later on when you are searching for images you have on file.
- Place each of the 20 photos into its appropriate folder under “My Images for Content Creation.”
If you will do 20 photos 3 times a week you will soon have a robust library that is tagged and sorted into folders that are meaningful for you.
TIP: Images work to build brand awareness and boost sales when they are unique to you, so use your own images first when you can. Share on X Don’t worry they are not professional or perfect. You can edit almost any image into something useable for social media or on blog posts. Let your personality and uniqueness shine. I do go for focused, not fuzzy. But then I’ve seen people offer compelling and eye-stopping content with a fuzzy image, too!
Step Three:
Repeat the process above for the first 20 of the stock photos you have purchased the rights to use. You probably won’t edit these although you might crop one for a specific use. First put them all into your folder “Stock Photo Images for Content Creation.” As you title the image sort these 20 into subfolders by topic or by location.
Optional Step Four:
An additional step for your stock photos is to set up a spreadsheet for those stock photos you have used. List the photo’s number, the topic or label you’ve given it, the date used and the link to the content it is found in. If you have used a stock photo in paid content make sure you purchased the correct rights for commercial use.
TIP: It’s perfectly acceptable to have one image in two folders. As an example an image might go into “Denali” and into “snow capped mountains.”
Being organized in this way will help you use what you’ve got, slowly add to your catalogued images 20 at a time, and prevent you buying a very similar image because you forgot you already had one to use. For your own images I recommend doing a “data dump” to your digital photo hub or hard drive and then separating out the images you might use in creating content. Move these images into your “My Images for Content Creation” and process them 20 at a time. I find it helpful to have a folder inside “My Images for Content Creation” that is labels “Unsorted Images.” You can take 20 (or less) at a time from that folder and into your editing program, moving them into your topic folders once they have been edited and tagged.
TIP: You will run across images you have purchased the use of (stock images) as well as some of your own that feel and look outdated, or off brand for you. This is especially true if you use fashion or makeup images. Don’t be afraid to toss what you will never use again. But be sure to keep any that are a part of your content, especially paid content. If you ever update that content you may need to reload that image into the updated content.
The end result of your organizing and decluttering is that you will have a stable of several hundred ready-to-go images for your content creation. Don’t organize more photos than you need, and add only what you have organized and labeled. As you go you’ll run across the ones that don’t fit your brand anymore and unless you need those for historical purposes or updating content don’t feel guilty about trashing them.
Resource for Templates to Use In Conjunction with Your Digital Images
If you are looking for template into which to place your images let me suggest Sarah Young’s wonderful monthly drop of templates through Biz Template Babe. These templates can give the wow factor to your images plus the monthly training on posting well on social media platforms is good. Here’s my affiliate link to check Sarah out and grab a few freebie templates, too.
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