Taking photos with your digital camera is fun, easy, and addictive. Suddenly, you find yourself with hundreds of photos on your hard drive, as well as printed out all over your desk, room, an walls. What should you do to organize and catalogue your photos?

Here are some tips to help you clean up the clutter, and enjoy your digital memories.

1. When you transfer your photos from your camera to your computer, immediately put them into a folder on your hard drive -- not just My Pictures, but create a subfolder by date or event name.

2. If you already have copious numbers of photos dumped into your My Pictures folder, take some time to create subfolders as described above, and sort them into the appropriate folder.

3. Regularly back up your photos by burning them onto a CD or DVD. Nothing is worse than having a hard drive crash and losing all of your pictures. Then, put your CD or DVD into a box, CD/DVD organizer, CD/DVD Wallet , or other types of storages.

4. As soon as the ink is dry, organize your photos into albums. The sooner you do this, the fewer photos you will have piling up and cluttering your space, not to mention getting damaged.

5. Do the above step for all of the photos you already have printed out. Use different albums to catalogue and categorize.

6. Do remember that if you back up your photos onto a storage media, and leave them on the computer as well, you will eventually find you have multiple copies of the same photo in different folders.

7. The rule is to put only photos about a particular subject on each CD and label it. For example, " college graduation" or "birthday 97" then if you want a particular subject you can find it easily because you don't have "summer 2000" on the same CD as "college graduation"

Tips

• Printed photos can also be stored in boxes. Some stores sell special "memory boxes" that are decorative.

• Back up your digital photos regularly.

• Download your photos off your camera as soon as possible after taking pictures. Neglecting to do so can lead to the nasty realization that your memory card is full at a bad time (like your kid's birthday party or your friend's graduation).

• If you use your images for a website, make sure to save the higher resolution original somewhere. This is because images saved for websites have a much lower resolution and look really terrible printed out.