How to Effectively Manage Hosting Images

It can be a challenge to manage all the images you upload to the Internet. Whether you are on Blogger or are managing your own blog (as in the case with WordPress), images quickly add up, especially if you insert more than one into each post. After several years, the management problem simply compounds and you’re left with a ton of images that you can’t make sense of.

There are a large number of image hosting services you can use other than the default service with Blogger, Picasa. The problem lies in how you name files before you upload them, how you store and manage them online, and how you create a backup of the files.

Naming the Files

For search engine optimization purposes and to ensure that all your readers know what the image represents, many bloggers find that naming the file with “keywords” works. In the end, this could be effective, but not for the purpose of managing and organizing your files.

A good tip is to keep the images named in a manner in which you can search for them later. Although many people have “unlimited” storage space for images and files, it is more difficult to find them when they are spread out over multiple accounts. Additionally, over time the storage space begins to limit what you can upload in terms of size. Posts that require the same image can be re-linked to in the future, conserving space.

The main keyword should be included first, making it easy to find a particular image when sorted alphabetically.

Uploading the Images

All methods of uploading files will work, it’s what you do with the files during the process of uploading. Some people insist that all their blog’s image are placed in one folder or account online, while others will separate the images by month, in the event that an image or group of images has been deleted.

Some online storage accounts will display the date that the image was uploaded, but they must also contain some method to search by date. This makes it useful if you need to refer back to an image that hasn’t been inserted into your blog.

Everyone will have their own personal preferences when it comes to how they manage images once they have been uploaded online. Some may place them in folders by date, category, or all into one folder. Again, it all depends on how many photos you are dealing with.

Tags and folders support will only make your life easier when it comes to managing your blog’s images online.

Backing Up Images

With multiple methods of backing up images, you have to find the preferable method that works. Depending on how many images you are dealing with, creating a backup may be easy or an extremely daunting task. In any situation, make sure you have multiple backups should anything go wrong with your site or the first two backup copies.

The best way to create a backup is to keep a copy on your computer, an alternative source, or on some type of removable media, like a flash or hard drive.

Periodically, it would also be a good idea to download the images directly from the location they are stored online. This ensures that if the service does go down, you have a way to upload the images in the same way to ensure that the images don’t become broken, having to re-link all the images.

Why Management Is So Important

Having a good backup, management, and organization plan is extremely important for multiple reasons. This backup serves mainly as a last resort option in the event that your storage account is hacked into or any other unfortunate problem arises.

Image credit: The Writer At Work