One of the things I’ve been dying to tackle with Project Organize Your ENTIRE Life is digital photo storage. I have thousands (maybe even tens of thousands? I’m not sure – I’m too scared to look) of photos currently on my computer. Not at all organized, not even a little. I just haven’t been sure how to go about it.
Then it hit me… I have some stellar professional photographers on my team, why not ask them how they do it? So today MPMK’s own professional photog Kristin is here doing just that – sharing her fast and dirty technique for organizing her thousands upon thousands of photos.
My tip? Don’t get overwhelmed trying to catch up with photos from the past. Start implementing this system for all photos from now on and catch up with the rest on a rainy day.
One of my favorite things about going home is looking through the old photo albums with my siblings. Each photo represents a memory. But how many times have we wondered… where were we? How old was I? What were we doing?
We’re actually lucky that our parents took the time to document our growing up in the 70′s and 80′s! One of the benefits of living in 2013 is digital photography and the ease of taking and storing photos.
And yet, it seems silly that one of the most valuable things we own gets treated so carelessly sometimes. Taking the time to capture a moment in time should mean organizing and correctly storing it.
Here’s the process I use:
1. Download my photos from my memory card. I don’t leave them on the card forever. It’s easy to forget what you’ve downloaded and accidentally format a card (erasing your photos forever). So, the day I take the photos is the day I download them.
2. When I download my photos I create a folder and label it. For example, if I took photos at the preschool open house, the folder might say ‘Jillian’s Preschool Open House’. You can get more specific if you want.
3. At this point I go through the photos and delete any that I don’t want (eyes closed, blurry, etc). This just helps with digital storage space. And quality is always better than quantity!
4. The folder is then moved into a folder for that month…so this one would be moved into January 2013.
5. I keep the January folder on my desk top so I can easily move photos into that folder as I take them throughout the month.
6. When January is over, I move that folder into the yearly folder, which would be Eldridge 2013. My folders go all the way back to 2000 when I got my first digital camera!
I’ve found this process to not only help with organizing the photos and cutting back on the amount of photos that I store, but it’s also easy to find the photos when I’m looking for something specific. I recently wrote about how important it is to document life here, because things don’t stay the same for long. So, take the extra effort to organize and store your photos. Your kids will thank you one day!
This post is part of MPMK’s “Project Organize Your ENTIRE Life”. You can read all about it here, check out all of our projects here, and join thousands of POYEL facebook group members here.
Kristin
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{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for this tip; it is not too unlike what I do. However, what do you do with the stray photos, like when you grabbed the camera for a quick shot of the kids reading on the couch together? That does not seem to warrant its own folder, but I would want it to be kept in chronological order with the other multi-photo events of the days surrounding it.
I have the same question as Karyn. I find that as I go back through my folders, I find random pictures that are keepsakes but without a proper place. A few years ago I made folders by season entitled “Around the House” and kept the photos there but then missed them while scrapbooking. Any advice?
Karyn and Carol Ann,
I agree…there are lots of random photos, especially since I now take a lot of them on my iphone. When I download, I could just name the folder ‘random photos in January’ and put all the non-event photos in there. I have 3 kids, so sometimes, I’ll put their name on the folder like ‘Jillian-January’ and put loose photos of her in that folder.
There’s no right way to do it. The point is being able find your photos and have a tag that will help you remember where you were and what you were doing when the photo was taken.
-Kristin
Do you know of any (cheap/free) photo organizing software that allows you to tag photos?
I use Adobe Bridge that comes with my free with Photoshop. I know you may not have Photoshop, so I looked up free programs for organizing photos and found this link with 10 free programs for photo management. Hope that helps!
-Kristin
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/10-free-photo-managing-software-you-should-at-least-know/
Karlotta, if you use windows, Photo Gallery is a brilliant and free software. You can add tags to your photos and all that information is actually saved in the pictures themselves so even if you open them with a different programs, all the tags will be there. Another great feature of Photo Gallery is face recognition. Once you start assigning names to the detected faces, Photo Gallery will recognize those people in future pics and you’ll be able to use their names as search categories!
Do you recommend any online storage or backup system? I’m always fearful that my computer will crash and we won’t be able to recover lost photos. (It’s only happened once, pre-kids….) I would die if I lost my daughter’s first birthday photos or her smiling in her high chair…
I would recommend Dropbox as an online storage place for photos!
Hi Courtney,
I use Lacie hard drives. They are so tiny and hold a ton of photos. I buy them on Amazon and all the pros use Lacie because they have a very very low failure rate. I’m sure you know that even back up drives can corrupt. I’ve used Lacie for many many years and never had a problem.
I love that they are easily portable, because I can just throw it in my bag and bring it with me to show photos somewhere other than my home computer.
Hope that helps!
Kristin
I organize like this too, but continue to have two things come up for me that i’d like to know your advice for.
1. i often move from my desktop to my laptop. i have photos in both places. any suggestions on how to merge them so i can access both?
2. question one always leads me to question 2, i would like to have backup or ‘cloud’ storage. suggestions??
thanks!!
I would suggest having your portable hard drive, I use the Lacie as your main storage. That way you can easily access them from your laptop or computer. Then for back up, try DropBox.
Domonique, I managed to fix that same issue by buying an external hard drive that acts like a server. I haveit connected to my router so now, both my hubby and I can access/save files to this share place from our personal laptops. It can also be accessed from Iphones, Playstation and pretty much anything that can connect to the internet! I totally love it! The one we got is the Buffallo Live station (or something similar) and it was very easy to set-up!
I have been importing directly to iPhoto for years, thinking that although they look so organized, when I actually go to my images folder on the laptop, they are not organized at all.
The way this appears to me is that uploading to iPhoto is not helpful in organizing your photos and the step is bypassed completely, is this correct?
I don’t use iPhoto either for organizing my photos. I should mention that I print yearly books through apple and it makes you use iPhoto to start, so I’ll just import into iPhoto and then create the book. It’s just an easy way for my kids to look at the photos (and lets you write memories).
I’ve been importing into iPhoto TOOOOO. Worst decision ever, but I don’t know how to stop! Help
I use Aperture for downloading and storing all of my photos. I try to upload my photos onto my computer the day that I’ve taken them to keep things simple. When I upload the photos Aperture asks if I’d like to add them to an existing project or create a new one. I simply create a new project with the date and description in the title. Writing the date in year, month, day order is the best as the projects are sorted alphabetically. If I’m feeling super organised (which isn’t always the case!) I then move the project into a folder of related projects. I have all sorts of folders set up such as Travel, Family, Craft Projects… If I want to look through my photos in date order I can always just click on the “Projects” tab at the top and the projects appear in date order. I find this a simple way of keeping track of where all my photos are and as I pretty much always use Aperture to look at them they’re really easy to find.
I’m super paranoid about losing my photos so we have quite a few back up steps as well. My photos are all stored on an external hard drive (my older iMac is starting to get a little flakey at times). We have a second external hard drive which runs a back up program every hour. My husband also keeps a third external hard drive at his work. Once a week he brings it home, does a back up and then takes it straight back to work. That way we’re covered for pretty much all situations that might result in losing our photos: computer dying, theft, fire in our house… Did I mention that I’m paranoid about losing my photos?
My Mum drives me crazy as she leaves all her photos on her memory card and then visits K-Mart or somewhere similar when the memory card is full and uses their photo machines download them all onto a CD. She then deletes the memory card and starts over again. She doesn’t sort her photos into folders so whenever she wants to show someone a photo she has to go through the entire CD to find it! I did manage to convince her to upload her photos daily to her iPad while she was on a recent European vacation but I know she’s gone straight back to her old habit once she got home.
Wow! Your system sounds great! I like the idea of having the third hard drive at the office in the worst case scenario.
I recommend Picassa! I’ve been using it for years and love it. I use the hierarchical folder sort so I can see my years and open them up to see the months. You can tag, create albums, etc. For example, I take pictures of my son’s artwork, and I’ll leave it in the monthly folder, but yet tag it to see all the artwork together as well. My videos are organized in Picassa the same way. Also, because it just accesses my folders from their location, it’s easy to back-up all the folders, and the yearly/monthly organization will still be there – that’s not dependent on Picassa.
Oh, and I should also say – we have an external hd for backup. We also will burn to a DVD every few months, and those are kept in my parents’ safe at their house. We are planning to replace those with another external hd soon – since we got our iPhones we fill 4-5 DVDs/year, so that will get out of hand soon.
I, too, noticed that you work on a Mac, but you do not use iPhoto. I wonder if I should stop (or use both?). I love how iPhoto lets me click through the photos in a sequence, whereas if I store them in a folder on the HD, I have to click to open each photo. i find that annoying and cumbersome. Any tips?
Amy,
You’re right, I’m a mac lover! I’ve gotten used to viewing my photos in Bridge, so I haven’t explored iPhoto. But, if it works for you stick with it! Just use the folders (naming and organizing) in iPhoto!
Kristin
Thank you for the great tips! I also have the same question as Amy. I am posting a comment so I can see if she gets a response. Thank you!
Amy and Jennifer,
If you’re using a mac, open your hard drive and go to the Finder menu at the top. You’ll see a View Menu button. Click on ‘as Cover Flow’ and expand the window you are viewing the photos in. You’ll be able to see the photos like a slide show instead of a list of image numbers.
Hope that helps!
Kristin
I use iPhoto and like it. I love being able to click through pictures too much to just deal with folders where you can only click on one picture at a time. Inside Iphoto I have “folders” events for each week because that’s the way I scrapbook. When I first started organizing them I lumped them together by month and by big events and then went back through and did smaller groups. It’s a lot easier to tackle 200 pictures from March then 1000 pictures from who knows when.
These are great suggestions. I have some many photos saved in different places it’s hard to find them. Thanks for the tips and inspiration.
Ladies:
I have just Pinterest-stumbled upon this blog and am in love. I to, live in a world that longs for organization, but find it takes a backseat to everyday life.
I just wanted to mention that in addition to external hard drives for backup storage of photos, I also burn disks and ship one to my parents and my sister at the end of every year. This is my “backup-backups” just in case.
I can’t wait to keep looking around for great ideas!
*Should I mention that I am “cleaning” my house right now? Does this look like cleaning to you? I’m reading about organization – that should count for something. Ha!
Great tips. I organize my photos very similarly and it has saved a lot of headache! Now if I could just get myself to get them actually printed…lol.
Do you use iPhoto at all? Or no? I’m in the process of re organizing ALL our pictures. We keep them in iPhoto but I kinda like the idea of using folders like that instead. But I do use iPhoto for a lot of quick editing.. xx
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