How to Properly Organize Your Photos

The process of organizing pictures is a time-consuming, but crucial task. Keeping your images organized and backed up will save you a lot of time and headache in the future. Therefore, it is essential that you do it properly early on and keep a consistent system in place. Photographs are our precious memories frozen in time, and we simply cannot afford to lose them. In this article, I will provide detailed information on how you can organize your digital photographs on your computer and implement simple backup practices.

The Best Way to Organize Photos

• Find All Printed Photos. If you have printed images, find every single one that you want to preserve and digitize. Go through all prints and family albums. Considering reaching out to other family members to locate more photographs.
• Digitize Printed Photos. Once you locate all the photos, use a good-quality scanner to scan the photos in high resolution.
• Locate Digital Photos. Go through every device, starting from your smartphone all the way to external drives to locate every digital photograph you have.
• Use a Single Storage Device. No matter how many photos you have, it is best that you put them all in a single storage device. If your current storage device has insufficient storage, buy an external hard drive with enough capacity to fir your entire photo library.
• Use a Solid Folder Structure. Once you put all the photos in a single location, come up with an easy-to-remember folder structure that you can use consistently for all your photos today and in the future. I recommend splitting your photos into folders organized by year and event name.
• Organize All Photos. After you decide on the folder structure, go through all the images that you previously scanned, as well as your digital photos, then organize them. This is going to be the most time-consuming process.
• Backup Your Photos. Now that you have all the photos properly organized by folders, it is time to back them up. Use several local storage locations to back up your photos. Also, consider using online cloud storage to store another backup.

Conclusion

How often should you be backing up? I suggest backing up every time you add more photographs or when you work on your pictures. I personally try to do it every time I upload new photos from my camera and I highly recommend that you do the same. Unfortunately, most people do not recognize the value of backups until their equipment fails. I once lost two weeks of my photography just because I forgot to backup my photos! Lesson learned, now I try to backup as often as I can and I store my images in four different locations – I do not want to ever lose my data again.

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