By John DeFore

Though we’re always relieved when the tree needles are vacuumed and the lights safely stored for next year, it’s a mistake to think that’s the end of post-holiday organization. Take all those photos you snapped of the family: Isn’t keeping track of them more important than knowing what box the tinsel is in?

In the old days, this was a simple matter. You took a few rolls of film to the drugstore, picked up the prints and put them in a shoebox. But today’s digital cameras and plentiful memory encourage us to take far more pictures than we would if we had to pay for each one, which means many of us have computer folders stuffed with thousands of images, both beautiful and blurry, and no easy way of finding the few we’ll treasure.

After house guests are gone and cleaning is done, invest an hour or two of your downtime in archiving all that stuff — 20 years from now, you’ll be glad you did.

Start by downloading pictures from any digicams in the household to a single computer. Throw them all in one folder and go through them mercilessly, deleting any image that’s blurry, badly exposed or captures somebody making a face they wouldn’t want preserved for posterity. Where you find that you have five or ten images of the same scene, find the best one and toss the rest. Name the files as you go; that way you won’t have to open “P250056.JPG” to know it’s “Uncle Larry carving the turkey.”

Plenty of pieces of software aim to help with this task — your camera probably came with some — but if learning how to use a program is holding you up, don’t bother. Unless you want to crop, tweak and fix instances of red-eye, any old computer picture-viewer will do.

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