With the convenience of taking photos on your phone and other devices why is it so inconvenient to organize them?
Here are a 3 simple tips from Alex Slattery, a professional photographer, on the best way to organize and protect your memories.
1. Designate one place where all your photos go on your computer. This will be your main folder where all your images go. Only use one folder and only use it for your photos…nothing else!
2. Inside your main folder you will begin to add other folders. Each of those additional folders will hold your dated photos.
So instead of trying to categorize them by like i.e., food, people, places… categorize them by date. It’s much easier to organize your photos this way. You will hopefully have your photos printed and possibly make a photo album out of them and your focus will probably be on a trip, vacation, or specific life event. Those folders should be dated beginning with the year first, then month, then day(s).
Yes… you will be dating things backwards!
This will keep everything in order from latest to your most recent photos.
Example, if you were on vacation in Florida on August 24th thru the 29th 2018 you would label your folder 180824-29_Florida. But if you are not a shoot all the time kind of person you can just date it with the year and month and a short description of the images taken, i.e., 1808_family_home_vacation for all your photos for that month. This way you would have 12 folder for the year inside your main folder.
3. I bet you’ve heard the saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, the same goes for your photos.
Back up that main folder that is on your computer with all your memories to an external hard drive. It is never a good idea to have all your memories in one place only. Computers, hard drives, and even clouds crash. It’s not if it will crash… but when. The cloud is a good way to back up your images as well however, it shouldn’t be your first backup. I believe you should have access to your images whenever and however. Giving control away to a third party can turn out bad, especially if you forget to pay the fee to store your photos. So I’d recommend the cloud as a good third place to have your photos.
Organizing your images shouldn’t be daunting. Use these simple tips to stay organized and know where all your valuable memories are.
Alex is a Southern Californian child and family photographer who also works with businesses to align their image with their message. Her photographs are real, authentic, and bring joy to her clients lives!
CLICK HERE to see her work and sign up for her free newsletter to learn some awesome tips and tricks for taking better photos and stay in the know about how professional photography can improve your life.
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