I have had a few requests for information on how to best organize your digital photographs - a quarantine project perhaps? So, I’ll outline my personal process here for you as well as point you in the direction of a good resource I found online. This is so important when you invest time and money in professional photos, as well as photographing everyday moments with your personal camera or phone!

Step 1: Get All Your Photos in One Location

Make sure all of your phone, camera and purchased files are on your computer so you can begin to organize ‘em! I have my phone pics automatically sent to my icloud so I can easily drag and drop em to my hard drive. One note: some digital files can be quite large, and if you don’t have enough storage on your computer, you’ll need a separate hard drive to keep them on. This is what I do with both my personal and professional client pics.

Step 2: Organize by Year, Then Event

I literally have all the photos I’ve taken since 2009 in folders for each year. Within those I have subfolders for things like holidays, birthdays, vacations in the order they happened that year. So I have “Moses’s 8th Birthday” for example, but precede the folder name with a date so the computer will list it in the correct order, so the full folder name would be “2009-08-12 Moses’s 8th Birthday”.

Step 3: Cull ‘Em and Back ‘Em Up!

Once you get to this point, if you haven’t culled photos you don’t care to keep, go ahead and delete them now. Most people will have several shots that are of the same thing and very similar perspectives, so choose the best one and only keep photos that show a different story from that date. No need for 17 photos of your kid opening the same gift at their party!

Then, I can’t stress this enough: BACK THOSE SUCKERS UP! Always have them in at least two different places. Mine are on a hard drive as well as a cloud backup through Carbonite, and most are on my computer’s hard drive and phone pics are backed up on icloud. OneDrive, Google Drive and Amazon’s cloud are also options. Technology will always fail at some point, files become corrupted, something gets a virus, God forbid a natural disaster happens….you get the idea:)

Step 4: Print Those Suckers!

If you didn’t purchase prints of your photos, do it now! I like to have books printed for each year, and then get smaller prints to give to friends and family, and every couple of years replace a few larger photos on my walls. I can’t stress the importance of this step. My kids still love looking at our wedding albums, family albums and even my senior high school pics! There is no point in having all this digital information if you can’t look at them regularly.

You’ve seen the memes about how the most photographed generation won’t have any printed photos in 10 years - print them for your grandkids to look back on!

The reason to organize them is to be able to quickly find them if something happens to your printed product and you need to replace it. You just can’t replace the feeling of looking at a printed photo with a computer or phone screen…and they quickly get lost in the mix, so before you know it you’re spending hours trying to find that “one” photo to show someone.

Here’s a really good blog post that I found that offers some additional ideas on naming individual pics (which I don’t do personally, but might make sense for some) and organizing by month: https://organize365.com/10-steps-organizing-computer-step-8-organize-digital-photos/.

Next post: I’ll talk about designing wall galleries and show you the designs I have in my own home!

Till next time,

Jamie