Organize Your Digital Photos

TIME TO GET ORGANIZED

It's a New Year, there's no better time to start being more organized.

I remember the days when I couldn't wait to use up the film in my camera, to take it to my local Photo Developing Store. It was exciting to receive that yellow envelope back from them with 24 glossy photos of my vacation. Couldn't wait to show my friends and family, and to have one placed in a picture frame on my desk at work.

Of course, now things are much more convenient where we don't need to print them out anymore, we can keep them on our phones to review, forever, and even transfer it on our computer or USB to show on the big TV screen. And because of this easy access, we are having now accumulated thousands upon thousands of photos, on our phones, camera, computer, laptop, external drives, making it extremely difficult to retrieve an important photo when we want it. I know you have made several attempts to get them sorted, but it just got so overwhelming, you just got stuck and continue to add more.

TAKING MANY PICTURES OF THE SAME THING

How many of us have taken several screenshots of a quote that we were going to put on our social media page, or taking 10 or more shots of our perfect puppy looking all too cute. Or all those selfies that went wrong. We take so many photos, the overload is real.

Well, today I'm going to help you get all those amazing memories sorted, so you will be able to access them easily.

It's going to take a lot of time and commitment. And you can no longer procrastinate because, by the end of this new year, you will have so many more photos. So let's get it done.

Before we begin, let's play a little game, go into your phone right now, (of course not if you are driving) but see what was the last 10 pictures sitting in your gallery.

My photos are:

A funny video someone sent me on WhatsApp

A Screenshot of the NY Daily Newspaper my son wanted to see the headlines.

Screenshot of Target gift certificate. So I can call it up quickly than looking for the email

Photo of my Dad playing his trumpet

A dress I was debating to buy in the store, of course, I went back and bought it

A copy of a New Years video I'm gonna use for next year

A screenshot of a total on my bank statement - needed it when I'm ready to do my taxes.

A photo of my car dashboard - I needed the mileage, getting my tires rotated.

A photo of 3 birds sitting in a berry tree - reminded me of my mother's favorite song.

A video of me running in my home testing a new video stabilizing equipment.

LET'S GET STARTED AND GET IT DONE

The first thing to do is to block out some time for yourself to concentrate on this project it's going to take some time so little by little you will get the job done.

1. Find where all your photos are located, such as:

Phone

Computer

Flash drives

Camera

Laptop

Tablet

Undeveloped film rolls

Paper photos

2. Start by transferring everything onto your computer. The reason why I'm saying this is to have all the photos located in one central place, plus having the big screen and keyboard, helps you to perform the process much faster and easier.

3. Take a look at what you have, and ask yourself what you really want to do with these photos. If you are a professional or someone who uses their photos to promote their business etc, I suggest you store your photos on Adobe's Creative Cloud. This is a great platform that gives you the ability to organize, edit and share your photos, and of course, store them. Their first tier plan in Photoshop Lightroom plan that gives you one terabyte of cloud storage, which is pretty amazing for approx. $9.99 a month. Or you can use the Free Google Photos Unlimited 15 GB drive. I personally love this product, as it's excellent at sorting people, places, and things. Just have to remember your photos have to be 16 megabytes and the videos up to 1080p storage. Effective June 1st, 2021, Google will start to add all newly uploaded photos towards the 15GM storage, but the good news, is that they will only be charging $1.99 per month if you need more space, you can't beat that.

4. Start to set up individual folders, bear in mind, you can not have a folder for everything, so try to group a lot of related photos. For E.g. Instead of having a folder for Dad, have one called Family. Or instead of having a folder called Italy, you can have it labeled as Travel, and maybe within the Travel folder, you can have a separate folder for the different countries you've visited.

5. Next get rid of duplicates, I know I'm not the only one when taking pictures of anything, I'm taking multiple copies, so I can pick and choose which ones I prefer, the problem with that is that the others remain on your phone without being used again.

There are many free Duplicate Cleaning programs you can download out there to help you to identify the duplications. Microsoft Windows has an App called Duplicate Cleaner Free and for MAC it's called Photos Duplicate Cleaner.

6. Once you have some sense of being organized, save them in Chronicle order, then you are in the position to preserve, retrieve, and share.

7. Going forward, start tagging your photos on your phone, the metadata assists any computer to be able to identify it. I know it's time-consuming, but it's well worth it when you can call up any photo easily, again stick with basic keywords and tag.

8. Rely on your phone's AI technology, it can sort by face recognition, dates, and locations.

9. Backup your photos/files, there's nothing worse than losing all your precious photos by error. I suggest backing up every night on your computer and hard drives or using any one of the free offsite cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, and Amazon Prime backup services.

10. Although I did not mention your photos on film rolls when getting them developed, you can request to have a digital copy accompanying them at additional cost. And all those paper photos that you have in a box somewhere, take your time to scan them or take a photo of them to get them on board too.

SHARE AND ENJOY YOUR PHOTOS

I keep a slide show on my digital picture frame in my office, whenever I look up it reminds me of precious moments.