It's important to understand that, in this article, I'm not looking at photo organizing programs. Even though there are a few excellent ones, including Google's Picassa, which is free, it's good for you to think of your photos as either individual pieces of paper (for printed images) or individual files (for digital images).

So, in this article, we're going to do it all by hand.

How are you going to organize your pictures?
Determine whether or not you want to sort your pictures by date (or just year), subject or event. Date order is the best way to categorize pictures of children as it allows you to track their progress over the years. Let's look at organizing a collection of printed photographs first.

Your print collection
Make sure you have a large area on which to work because you will need to spread out your pictures as you sort them. Most people wind up either using a dining room table, a bed, or the floor. Sitting on the floor and sorting photos can be a lot of fun -- just don't eat or drink while you're doing it or that pizza sauce will wind up on Uncle Willie's chin.

Make some date labels like 2000, 2001, 2007, and so on, and stick them on index cards or paper that will form the top of physical sorting columns. Go through your photographs and sort them in date order. Identify the pictures according to date (where possible) and place each under the year that corresponds with that period.

With this method, if you are using a photograph album or scrapbook make date labels for the outside cover or inside cover page. You can use a year, like 2006, or a range of years, like 2006-2007.

If you decide to use subject order, separate the pictures based on the subject, and place in the appropriately named column or envelope depending on how you are sorting your pictures. In this case, instead of placing dates on the albums, use the selected subject titles, like "David's First Year".

Organizing your digital collection
It is easier to determine dates of digital photographs so date order sorting is great for digital picture collections. Make one on-disk folder titled Photograph Collection or whatever works for you. Windows tends to like the My Photos folder name, but you'll probably want to organize your photos in your own folder, so Windows won't muck with the images.