Week #2 of Save Your Photos Month - Dealing with Digital Photographs
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It is Week #2 of Save Your Photos Month, and this week I am going to give you some tips on how to manage your digital photo collection.
I bet your digital collection gives you the most worry and causes you to feel overwhelmed - more than your printed collection. With the help of smartphones, taking pictures has never been easier! But it is also just as easy to lose those photos if your phone is broken or stolen.
Did you know in 2017 it was estimated 1.7 trillion photos were taken world wide? No wonder we are feeling so overwhelmed!
Delete the Bad & Ugly
The average person has well over 1000 photos on their camera roll. To help ease the feeling of overwhelm make sure you go through your camera roll regularly and delete the bad & ugly photos - you know the ones: the blurry shots, the blank shots from inside your pocket or purse, the 50 selfies your toddler took when they got a hold of your phone and even the ones that are just meh!
I also recommend deleting the "reminder" photos if they are no longer needed or moving them to a separate album or folder that you can refer to. This will keep them accessible but out of your camera roll.
While you are deleting the bad photos, I also recommend selecting your favorites by hitting the heart on your screen. This will add them to a special favorites folder that will make finding your best shots easy. You also won't have to worry about a friend or relative scrolling past any embarrassing photos when you hand over your phone. If it's in the favorites folder, they will only see your best shots!
** TIP **
I usually do this chore when sitting on the couch watching TV instead of scrolling through Facebook or Instagram.
Create a HUB with a Core File Structure
It is important to create one centralized home for your photos. We photo organizers call this a HUB.
We recommend using an external hard drive, which can be purchased at any computer store or electronics department, for your HUB. Using a computer, download or transfer all of your photos from all of your devices (phones, CDs/DVDs, SD Cards, USB sticks etc) to your HUB (external hard drive). This will make it easier to access your photos but also make it easier to organize all of them into a Core File Structure.
The Core File Structure is a series of file folders labeled by year, with more folders inside labeled my both year and month.
For example: 2019 > 2019-02-February
It is super easy to organize your digital photos by year and month as each digital picture has a date and time stamp on it.
Backup using the 321 Method
To keep your digital photos as safe as possible, I always recommend using the 3-2-1 Method.
At all times, you need to have 3 Copies of your photos on 2 Different Devices with 1 copy stored Offsite.
Your 2 different devices can include a computer, external hard drive or even printed copies.
Your offsite storage can be an external hard drive kept at a friends or relatives house, or I highly recommend using cloud storage. It is easier to maintain and have access to if anything were to go wrong.
Cloud Backup - Backblaze & Sync.com
Cloud storage is a great way to back up your photos and videos. However some services require you to manually add photos, which can leave them at risk if sometime happens to your computer or phone before you get a chance to update.
I personally use 2 services that AUTOMATICALLY back up my computer and smartphone - this gives me peace of mind knowing my photos are backed up even when life gets chaotic!
Backblaze is a great service to automatically back up your computer. It includes unlimited storage and will allow you to download your files from your online account if anything were to happen to your computer. It will also backup any external hard drives connected to your computer.
Sync.com is a great service which automatically backs up your photos and videos on your smart phone - it will even organize them into folders labeled by year and month!
What is your biggest challenge when organizing your digital photos?
Comment below and let me know! I may have a few suggestions to help make it easier for you.