3 Basic Steps to Organize Digital Photos
What to do about all the digital photos you have floating around your various devices? First, this is a very common problem and you’re not alone!
These days, our photos are on all kinds of devices such as phones, tablets, and computers. Then there are the memory cards in our digital cameras, USB sticks and our social media accounts. Feeling overwhelmed yet?
As with any organizing project you should have a goal in mind. What do you want from your photos? Albums or other keepsakes? Do you want to share them with your family and friends? Do you want to be able to find a specific photo and not have to search forever? How about leaving a meaningful family legacy to your children? Think about this goal before you do anything else. It is important because it will help you make decisions further down the line.
Digital Photo System:
Input
Write down where your digital photos are at this point in time. All those devices, cards, sticks and accounts.
Hub
Imagine the hub as a big bucket where you toss all your photos. It’s the place where you gather and organize all your digital photos. The hub is also what is (hopefully!) being backed up regularly. The hub could be your computer, an external hard drive or the cloud.
Output
Once you’ve gathered all your photos in one place and hopefully have them organized in one way or another it is time to actually enjoy your photos. How would you like to do this? Photo books, canvases, keepsakes? A digital photo frame or a video slide show? Prints? The possibilities are endless.
Take some time to think about what you want from your photo collection. Then start to gather all your digital photos from these devices and places. If you’re not sure about your hub yet, let’s assume it is going to be your computer. If you haven’t already started some kind of organization there for your photos, you should create a core file structure. This is nothing more than a folder per year with sub-folders per month and add your photos accordingly.
It looks like this:
2018
2018-01
2018-02
etc.
Photos In Place is always here if you need help along the way.
