My Deco File from Domino Magazine

UPDATE: My Deco File is no longer available as Domino Magazine has folded and taken their lovely website with it. If you're looking for way to store and organize inspiration photos, I'm loving tumblr right now.

If you are anything like me and spend a lot of time surfing the web and reading tons of blogs you probably come across many inspirational photos of interiors. They could be pictures that spark an idea for a home renovation project, a perfectly styled vignette, or a great way to arrange artwork. My biggest problem is figuring out a way keep all of these pictures organized. I would often email myself photos from the office and sometimes I would remember to save them on my personal computer once I got home from work. Other times they would get lost in my inbox and forgotten about forever. Other photos I would printed out and taped directly to the wall of the room they were meant to inspire. Needless to say I had to come up with a better system.

Domino Magazine must have been reading my mind because they came up with a great application to do exactly what I need. Dominomag.com now offers an applicaton called My Deco File, a free web-based tool that allows you to create an image library so you can keep all of your decorating ideas in one place. Your pictures can then be organized into albums called Deco Books that allow you arrange them by decorating project, by room, or however you please.

Right now, I've created about 13 different Deco Books. Some are general, like living room ideas or kitchen ideas, and other were created for specific desing projects. My Deco File also gives you the ability to email your deco books or embed them directly into a website or blog. Like this:

This is a Deco Book I created to organize ideas for my own living room:

[image removed, once Domino Magazine closed up shop the My Deco File site was taken down]

And these are a bunch of photos of beautiful kitchens I've come across that I'm holding on to for the future

[image removed, once Domino Magazine closed up shop the My Deco File site was taken down]

There are loads of options for adding photos to your image library and deco books. All of the pictures contained in the slideshows on dominomag.com now have a small folder icon that you click and the picture is added directly to your library. You can upload pictures directly from your computer, however, the best part is how easy it is to snag the photos from a website and save them to your library.

Domino has created a bookmarking tool called My Deco File Image Grab Bookmark. You add the bookmark to you favorites (instructions are provided on the site of course) and when you stumble on a particular photo that you would like to save you click on the bookmark and "grab" the photo. This will take you directly to your deco file where you have the option to save the photo to one of your deco books and add any notes or keywords you might want. Once the photo is saved you click "I'm Done" and you will be taken right back to the website where you found the photo. I love that it also captures and saves the name of the website along with the photo so you can refer back to the site in the future if you'd like. It's so simple that you are going to wonder how you got through life without it.

The one down side to this system may be that if the website where you found the photo ever removes it from their site, it will also be removed from your deco file. I'm considering eventually coming up with a system for filing all of my photos on my hard drive (or perhaps an external hard drive) but until then this is such an easy way to have everything organized and stored in one place. All of the photos are available anywhere you have access to the internet. A major bonus if you'd like to gather a bunch of images and perhaps show them to your decorator to convey your point of view.

Domino has been busy adding new features like batch upload and the ability to upload photos directly from your cell phone. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

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