What's this a picture of?

One of the problems you might encounter when returning from a trip is having a hard time matching your photographs with  the locations you visited.  A travel journal (see our articles Take travel notes and  Take travel notes: book or electronic) helps you keep track of where you have been on what day but even this may not be enough to help you identify the locations where you took the photos.

While many cameras offer the option to imprint the date on the image, usually the size of the data takes up a larger portion the image area than desirable and is distracting when you view the photos.  In some case, the date may obscure a desired background item.  Although you can crop the date off to make prints, we think this just adds one more reason why you might want to take a different approach.

If you have a digital camera, you can solve the picture location problem easily by creating file folders using the camera software and storing pictures by folders named for  locations. Of course, many people never take the time to learn how to do this with their digital camera.

We suggest you take the time to learn how to use your digital camera's file system, but if you do not, try to keep a written log of where you have been and associate the locations with a sequence number of the images shown on the camera display. Failing that, there is a tiny label on most memory cards to make a short note or two (in pencil, ).  An alternative is to save the plastic holder for the memory card and label it.

Finally, the EXIF files containing your pictures will have a date stamp and that might just be enough to jog your memory.  Of course, the sequence numbers on the images also help to keep everything in relative chronological order.

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