Last week, I shared how I organize my photos in Albums. You can read that post here.
I can't talk about organizing photos without talking about how I organize the digital photos. With smartphones replacing digital cameras, and the number of photos we can take is basically unlimited, we all have acquired ALOT of photos. I know I take photos of everything, basically. Things that I think are pretty, unique, cute; things I want to remember; things I need to buy etc. My camera roll is bursting with randomness.
Let's jump in to how I organize my digital photos.
Snapfish
Back in 2011, I got the idea to upload my photos to Snapfish and organize them. I started with my high school prom and RYLA 2005 photos, then I moved on to my college photos taken on a digital camera and uploaded to my computer. I had separate folders for each event-Nature Walk, Prom, RYLA 2005, Eastern, Midnight Bowling, etc. It was diligently and neatly set up, complete with a caption for the album describing it. I believe these photos used to live on my desktop computer.
Then after I got caught up with all those photos, I got an iPhone in May 2011. This was a game changer. now I had an actual camera with me that would produce good photos. (I also have an album on Snapfish with all my flip phone photos; they were tiny and super grainy. But I couldn't part with them; they were just too sweet.) I lumped together Disney World 2011 trip photos and then Summer 2011. It wasn't until the Fall when I started labeling the albums on Snapfish by dates.
Whenever the mood struck me/when I remembered, I would upload whatever photos I had taken to Snapfish. Most of these uploads were random and there was no context to them. Usually a lot of selfies and random things that caught my eye. I hadn't figured out yet how to properly use the screenshot option nor had I learned how to upload screenshots into these albums.
Looking through these albums, these dated albums would continue through 2013. I finally figured out how to use screenshot feature and I also learned how to upload the screenshots to Snapfish. There were random albums that had a theme like wedding or POF or BF but those were far and few between. In 2014 it seems, that the albums were getting bigger and the duration between albums was getting longer. By the end of 2014 into 2015 (specifically around the time when my appendix burst) I didn't upload photos that often. In March of 2016, I went back and uploaded photos by month starting with January 2015. These month updates continued for a while but not consistently.
In 2017, I picked back up with monthly uploads from my camera roll. I continued that until mid 2020. I think in 2021, I uploaded one album and in 2022, I have random albums that I created for the sole purpose of getting prints or photo projects.
Photo of the Day (#POTD)
I had started in August 2011 a photo of the day project. I made it two years and ended up with two photo books filled with 365 photos to represent every day for those two years. It's fun looking back at these because I can recall exactly why I took that photo and where I was. In March of 2017, I gathered POTD photos from August 2013 to January 2017 minus most of 2014 and the beginning of 2015.
I would love to continue this project making photo books for each year. I have cataloged the photos for each month, maybe not taking photos each day but I have a nice collection of photos from each month. Especially since I have been keeping a monthly photo diary since January 2020, I would love to have a collection of these books to look back on years from now.
Google Photos
During 2020, I really started to rely heavily on Google Photos. It was easy to use, the photos I took on my phone went directly to Google Photos, and I was able to organize those into albums. It was quick and easy and really user friendly. I have albums for all of my diary posts, funnies posts, memes posts etc. It all right at my fingertips.
I think I started thinking about the what if's with Snapfish. What if the website gets hacked and I lose all my photos? What if Snapfish closes? (Do websites even close down?) Lots of questions swirled through my head and continue to. I have a lot of photos that the digital version only lives on Snapfish.
I love the search feature in Google Photos. If I am looking for photos that have flamingos in them, one search brings up all the flamingos. I can search a date or place or a face. It makes finding things so easy! This search feature is something that Snapfish does not have and has made me like Google Photos more.
External Hard Drive
I had an idea years ago to take all the photos (all 40,000 photos!) and put them on an external hard drive. At the time, there didn't seem to be an easy way to extract those photos. I had to go through each album and manually download them. Can you imagine working your way through 40,000 photos to manually download them to your computer? Heck no! I got scared/bored after a few albums and dropped the project. Maybe they came up with a better system? I hope! I would love to have these photos backed up because some are real gems!
I have one that currently houses documents and projects from my old Macbook from college circa 2007-2009. I have no idea truly what's on it because I haven't plugged it in, in a while.
Going Forward
I would love to start in 2023, to slowly move my photos to this external hard drive and to organize them properly. I would also like to do a monthly upload of all the photos and screenshots I took in that month. I know this move project is going to take a long time. I hope to set up mini goals each month to not overwhelm myself with this and remember that Rome wasn't built in a day, and I won't complete this in a day either.
I will also continue to print out photos that are extra special and add them to physical albums. As much as I love the ease of digital photos, there is just something extra special about photos that are printed out.
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I am consistently curious about how others organize things and learning about their organization process, helps me create my own. Carly Riordan did a great post recently, on how she organizes her photos and its pretty genius. You can read that here.
My question for you is how do YOU organize your photos? Let me know in the comments below.
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[[Take your camera wherever you go, use it as a visual diary. Capture photos of objects, places and people. ]]
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