Think about it. We spend more time organizing our closets, kitchens and garages than we do in organizing our precious photo memories. Why is this? It’s not hard to imagine how devastating it would be to lose precious photos. Once lost, they can never be reclaimed or reproduced. Perhaps your husband accidentally tosses out those boxes of vintage family photos that are “just gathering dust in the attic” or your wedding photos are damaged beyond repair when a pipe bursts in the basement. You get the picture (so to speak).

I’m not just talking about preserving and accessing hard copy photos either. I’m also referring to the hundreds, if not thousands, of digital photos sitting on your camera’s SD card or somewhere on your computer’s hard drive. Where they can be found on your computer is anybody’s guess.

As precious as our photo memories are to us, we continue to procrastinate. If you are like me, you can always come up with excuses, which usually revolve around a lack of time, energy and interest to name a few.

It is high time we elevate this rather mundane, yet important organizational task to its proper position of high priority on the “to do” list and get that photographic diary in order. This would include scanning and organizing those photos from the shoebox in the closet, as well as capturing those photos from old albums that mom and dad used to meticulously manage the family’s valued photographic memories. In today’s age of computers, there are software assistants to help with this task. I would like to suggest a fairly new photo organization application that elegantly brings order to your photo disarray.

Fotobounce is a free software application that you download from the Internet. Within a short time, you will find it to be as indispensable to your photo organization as your shoe organizer is to your Malono Blahniks. This photo assistant offers features to help make photo organizing and sharing simple. While easy-to-use, make no mistake – as an organizational tool, it is a powerful ally. Once installed, the software will search for and organize photos based on people it finds in those photos. This is by design, since most photos revolve around people.

People in the photos are found by using advanced face detection and recognition technology. Once a face is detected, you have the ability to identify and tag those people. This is accomplished by “training” the software to recognize a face by initially “putting a name to a face,” and then letting the application continue finding other faces that look similar. These similar faces are displayed as suggestions. As you confirm or reject its suggestions, it further refines its ability to identify a particular person.

The reason I find organizing by people so important is that I always seem to be searching for photos of a specific person, couple, or a group of people. I have thousands of photos on my computer and I keep adding about a thousand to the collection every year. Inevitably, I find myself spending valuable hours searching through photos to find a handful of specific ones, whether they are photos of a friend for a birthday slide show, or perhaps I’m having a couple over for dinner this weekend and I want to show photos of our last trip to New York City on my digital photo frame. With my photos now tagged using Fotobounce, I can quickly find the photos I’m looking for, which makes it easier for me to share and enjoy my photos with friends and family.

There are many other ways that Fotobounce helps put you in control of your photo collection, allowing you to further organize your “photo closet;” however, I’ll leave those for another article.