I made a sort of New Year’s resolution to get this issue under control. I figure now that five months of the year are already about over, it might be time to get started.
So here is where I’m at. I have 5.5 years of digital photos on my desktop computer. This computer is old, slow, and very outdated. The Mr. gave me the go-ahead to buy up a new laptop and I didn’t blink before clicking “buy”. The new laptop has a super ginormous hard drive and to add to that, I purchased a large external hard drive as well. Since both devices have huge capabilities for data storage, my plan is to keep the full set of photos on both the computer and the external hard drive. If one goes out, I have a back up.
I am also going to supplement these hard drive devices by adding my photos to the infamous cloud. In the unlikely event that my laptop and my external hard drive go down at the same time, I’ll have a digital back up of my photos. If the internet explodes and takes my laptop and hard drive with it, well, I think we have bigger problems on our hands than to worry about where my photos went.
I researched some free photo storage options online and decided to go with Shutterfly. They offer free and unlimited photo storage with the capability of printing directly from the site. Easy enough for me.
Once I decided where to save my growing number of digital memories, I needed to decide how. Sure, I could just keep them all in a "Pictures" folder, but if I ever need to go back and pull out a photo from, say, Christmas 2010, I’m not sure I’d ever find it.
The first step was to sort my photos by year. Since I have photos saved from 2008 through the present, I created sub folders within my Pictures folder; one for each year.
Next, I plan to go through each year and sort the pictures by event. I say “I plan” in future tense because this step is not yet complete. I am working on year 2011 though, so that’s progress right? So within each year's sub-folder, I will have multiple sub-folders for each event. For example, within my 2008 folder, which is not visible in the picture above, I have sub-folders for Christmas, Summer, Fall, etc.
Once the photos are divided by event, I will go through each photo and decide which ones are keepers. I don’t think I need the four snapshots my brother took of his nose at mom’s birthday three years ago.
Why would these photos even be on my computer, you ask? Laziness. I have no other excuse. When my memory card got close to full, I’d dump all the photos on my camera into my picture folder on the computer and move on. There is no use in storing photos that I don’t really need. So each event folder will be pared down to only the necessary, good, quality photos.
My next step will be to re-name the photos so that when I am looking for that great Christmas family shot from 2010, it is easy for me to find. I plan to name my photos the following way:
YEAR EVENT SUBJECT.jpeg
For example: 2008 Christmas Family Photo.jpeg
What if I have more than one family photo from Christmas 2008 I’d like to keep?
2008 Christmas Family Photo 1.jpeg, 2008 Christmas Family Photo 2.jpeg, etc.
Each keeper photo will be saved as a jpeg file in a 4 x 6 print size. If I ever need to print larger, I can resize the photo in my photo editing software.
Having my photos arranged in the manner above will make it easy for me to find what I need when I need it. It will be a bit time consuming on the front end since I’m five years behind, but I’ve already started this process for any new photos I take so once I get caught up, it will be a breeze.
I’m also considering putting together a hard copy photo book for each year of photos to create a volume for each year of our family. We’ll see about that in the future!
If you’re motivated to get your own mess of digital photos in order and backed up, here are some links:
Online Photo Storage
1.) Flickr
2.) Photobucket
3.) Snapfish
4.) Shutterfly
External Hard Drives
1.) WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB
2.) WD My Book 4 TB
3.) Seagate Expansion 1 TB
4.) Toshiba Canvio Connect 2 TB
If you’re already a pro at organizing your digital memories, I’d love to hear your secrets!
This post was shared in a link party at:
No comments:
Post a Comment
I appreciate your comments and read every one! I look forward to hearing from you!