How to Organize Digital Photos And Memories
How to Organize Digital Photos
Welcome to day 31 of the 40-day clutter challenge. Our goal is to declutter, organize and tidy for 20 minutes or less per day while choosing 12 items to get rid of that we no longer love, need or use.
Today we are working on digital photos.
( Insert crazy face here)
When I was a young girl with my first Kodak camera I had to save up my chore money and patiently wait for my dad to take me to the local Walgreens to turn in my little film cartridge. A few days later I would pick up a set of photos that were fun but really not very good. Those cheap little first cameras took a whole bunch of patience and patience is not my strong point.
These days I whip out my iPhone
and take sixty photos in a couple of minutes of my toast in the morning and then post it on Instagram. Okay, so maybe not my toast, but you get what I mean.
We can literally take hundreds of digital photos per day and oh my goodness it is so much fun. But what of nostalgia?
Our children should not have to flip through 4 million photos of toast and selfies to find their first birthday photo. It is so overwhelming when you start digging through all of those photos that you are normally just end up browsing and reminiscing about past vacations and how thin you looked 10 years ago. 🙂
Let’s Dig In
Find Your Top 12 Categories
How in the heck are we going to deal with all of those photos?
We are not. We are going to read a couple of articles today and then make a decision on how we are going to commit to keeping our memories better organized.
Our 12 will be flipped today. Today I want you to dig through those photos and find your top 12 favorites.
- A wedding memory.
- Photos of your children
- Your siblings
- Your best friend
- Your pets
- Your first home
- Your parents
- Historical photos of family and events from way, way, back
- Military photos
- Your Educational Years ( just a few from preschool, high school, and college)
- Etc.
Once you find your top 12 favorites you will have an idea of how to start organizing your digital photo collection and what is most important to you in the vast sea of photo memories. These 12 photos will most likely be your 12 categories of keeper photos. The rest is just a collection for you. You kids just want to know the highlights, if you hand them a digital package of 4 million photos you are just handing them a huge guilt trip and the part-time job of digging through trying to find the 12 categories we are going to find today.
Don’t Just Sit There! Start!
Now starting today after your upload your photos to your chosen destination, Google Photos, Photos on Mac, Picasa
,
Flickr or even Dropbox. Take a few minutes and say will my kids or grandkids enjoy these photos later in life? Will they have real meaning to them or is this a photo collections of my favorite shoes or the BBQ chicken sandwich I had for lunch yesterday?
Update: I have been using Dropbox and organizing the most important photos to my family. I think back upon an external drive. This works best for our family. I organize the photos by category in files.
Organize Digital Photos That You Love
As you find photos with real meaning, choose to only share and categorize the very best two or three from the group, not 35 or the whole shoot. Remember, you will be collecting these photos for decades! After you choose to put them in a separate organized file and add files within files when needed. (like birthdays or your children,
their weddings, their first car, etc.) START right away! When you have free time, work backward and add the ones that you have collected over the years. Your family, friends, and kids will appreciate these photos so much more and you can take time to add when the event happened and other fun information.
Quote: ” I just want to sit here and chew my bubble gum”. ~ J3 age 5
Tomorrow is Reader’s Choice!
Question: How do you organize your digital photos?
