There is a lot of photo organizing software on the market which at first glance might appear to be the ideal solution for sorting and storing your pictures but could easily end up eating up valuable space on your computer hard drive. As your hard drive fills up some of your pc functions could slow down.

There are a number of solutions available to facilitate storing data. Which solution is best for you depends on how much you want to spend in terms of hard cash and time.

The easiest solution is to purchase a USB hard drive. Nowadays you can purchase a 500 Gigabit hard drive on Amazon for less than $100. You can also find a range of new ones on eBay. When buying a hard drive it's always best to buy new. You never know with second hand hard drives if they are prone to hanging up or crashing or simply near the end of their life.

Once you have your new USB hard drive it's simply a case of plugging it into your pc (most USB devices are plug and play) and transferring all your photo files across to the hard drive.

It's always a good idea to save a copy of your favourite pictures to a separate file and burn those onto a DVD, as well as copying them to the hard drive. This ensures you have a good back up of your favourite pictures.

If you don't want to spend the money on a hard drive then the next best solution is to save copies of the files you want to keep by burning them onto a DVD. Be sure to buy good quality blank DVD discs as there have been reports of earlier cheaper ones becoming corrupted with time as the dye fades with age.

Adobe Photoshop Elements and Google's Picasa have photo organisers but I prefer to arrange the pictures, files and directories myself. (I use windows explorer to create and organize the various files and directories.)

In addition to saving and storing my pictures I sort out the ones I want to keep on my pc and resize them. I use a free utility called Infranview to do batch resize. It only takes a few minutes to resize several hundred files, each around 3 Megabits, down to less than O.5 Megabit. I usually resize to 1000X700 approximately.