Cellphone cameras make picture-taking so accessible that we can easily bury ourselves in digital photos. If you’re like most people, your phone memory keeps getting maxed out, and you’re already uploading to a cloud account. Yet the purpose of photos is to preserve memories that are easily referenced—and to have them available to show your friends. A massive jumble of digital images makes it difficult to enjoy your captured moments. Let’s get you organized!
Plan your digital photo project
When you have hundreds or thousands of pictures, don’t feel pressured to organize and store them all at once. You’ll soon feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and fall into procrastination. Instead, follow the steps outlined below and devote yourself to small doses of photo organization when you have a few moments to spare.
Hit delete
When someone takes photos of your family at a vacation attraction, you often have several shots in portrait and landscape modes. The first organizing step is to delete, delete, delete! Purge all but the one or two keepers where everyone has their eyes open, and no strands of hair have blown across their faces.
Next, get rid of trivial pictures that no longer interest you. That novel-looking butterfly in your garden that you fancied enough to post on Facebook? Cleanse it from your photo file. Delete similar temporary flights of fancy.
Decide how you want to organize
Plan how you want to group your photos, such as by travel, holidays, family milestones, and so on. One essential element of photo organization is to date your shots. In the future, your memory may be fuzzy about what month or year an event happened. Create file folders labeled for each category you devise.
Save to multiple media
Don’t save your digital photos in just one place. After organizing, copy everything to a backup media. If your primary place is a computer hard drive, copy everything to a thumb drive or a cloud account. Remember, some media types may go the way of the VHS tape and become extinct. DVDs were a great tool 15 years ago, but they’re less popular now.
Make it easy to view your memories
You want to view and show your pictures, so consider something like a digital photo frame that rotates through your shots. Place one on a shelf or tabletop for all to see.
Include Throwback Thursdays
Finally, remember to include old hard-copy photos in your organization effort. Either gather them into scrapbooks or have them scanned, digitized, and added to your other digital photo files.
Related – Digital Photo Frames Showcase Family Photos in Fabulous Focus
