Preserving & Organizing Digital Photos

​Do you often think about creating a photo project but get discouraged because you just don’t know where to begin? If your digital photos are unorganized that is the place to start. I completely understand feeling overwhelmed about a photo project if your photos are all over the place.

Are your photos important to you? If so, begin the process of going through them where you can locate and enjoy them. Photo collages, photo scrapbooks, photo books, and photos in frames make very special gifts. Photo projects take time. The 1st most important step is protecting your photos by backing them up. Are your photos protected? Are your documents protected and backed up? APPO, Association of Personal Photo Organizers, recommends using Backblaze to automatically back everything up. I currently use Carbonite but I plan to switch over to Backblaze. The 2nd most important step is getting all your photos in one place and organized.  

Just get started. Go to each device where you have photos and begin to organize by year. It’s amazing how much you can get done when you have a plan of action. I recently organized my desktop computer photo gallery. I have folders for each year and a folder for each person in my family. Some photos are extra special so I make a copy of those and put them in the person’s folder in addition to the year.  
Just like printed photos your digital photos are kept in several different places.

• Hard Drives
• Tablets
• Laptops
• Cell Phones
• Camera Cards
• iCloud
• External Hard Drives
• Dropbox
• Shutterfly, Facebook, Instagram and other websites
• Spouse and Kids devices

Determine where your photos are. Go through and organize by year (make a digital file folder for each year) on each device. Take the time to delete any photos you no longer want and duplicates. Organizing in chunks on each device will make the process less overwhelming. When you are through deleting duplicates and photos you no longer want, empty the Recycle Bin.
Purchase an External Hard Drive (EHD) just for photos.

• Format the Hard Drive
• Organize your photos Chronologically 
• Transfer photos to the EHD

Now you have them all in one place and you have deleted everything you don’t want anymore. What an accomplishment!
There are software programs available to find duplicate photos and programs that use facial recognition.

Want a little help with this project? Give us a call.

Adele Gross
Chief Executive OrganizerSimple Solution Organizing
706-714-1314

www.simplesolutionorganizing.com
adele@simplesolutionorganizing.com

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