You’re so busy with life’s daily demands that downloading your camera’s memory card is a cause for celebration. Sound familiar? These hectic times make it all to easy to push family memory keeping to the back burner.
Fortunately, there are small steps anyone can take to grab the reigns on a disheveled photo library. Use these tips to prioritize your energy and build momentum for new routines in memory keeping.
- Make a list. While most everyone is using digital cameras these days, all but the youngest family photographers have traditional film prints and even negatives hanging around. Roughly inventory your entire photo library to get the lay of the land.
- Download, now. If you found that some of your images are still living on photo memory cards, change that right now. Start a habit of downloading your photos within 24 hours of snapping the pic so there is no burdensome backlog.
- Don’t over think. There are an endless array of software solutions for photo organization and storage, but not everyone needs them or has the time to leverage their capabilities. Start with a simple folder system before jumping into complex applications.
- Skim the surface. When you have a lot of photos to sort, don’t focus on the details such as tagging each image. Think about the big picture and work at that level of get things in a baseline sense of order. You can always come back later to add tags or sub-folders.
- Start labeling. It’s often easiest to work backward. Start with your most recent digital folder and decide on a labeling scheme. Use both the date and the event title in a folder for easy retrieval later.
- Multitask. Scanning can seem like such a repetitive chore. Set up your laptop and scanner on a card table in the living room so you can stay entertained while making progress.
- Backup. Every hard drive will eventually fail. Keep your images in at least 2, preferably 3, locations to ensure their safety. Remember that offsite storage, whether at your office, out of town, or online will add a layer of protection.
- Be patient. A lifetime of memories cannot be organized overnight. Consider your effort a work in progress and be OK with that. Work in blocks of 15 or 30 minutes to feel the most accomplished.
Organizing your photos need not be a monumental task. Just getting started will help you feel in control and reduce your memory-keeping anxiety. Stay focused and keep it simple to find more time for what you love.
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Yes! Backup, backup, backup! When my son was 3 my computer crashed and it was at that very moment that I realized essentially every photo I had taken of him was on that computer. Luckily it wasn’t completely fried and I got my pictures off but now I have two backups in place. That was scary!
What do you suggest doing with them once organized digitally. I keep up with that part but can’t ever decide if I should only print a few, put them in albums, make a digital album, photo boxes, etc. What are your thoughts about that? Thanks.
To me, it doesn’t make sense to print every photo anymore since we’re snapping pics more than ever! Digital cameras allow for multiple iterations of the same shot and have that handy delete button. Here’s my hierarchy of what’s next after the basic organization:
1. Full resolution jpgs get uploaded online – I use Flickr for both backup and family sharing purposes. Some albums I keep private. If you’re concerned about not sharing any of your photos publicly, services like SmugMug have extra security in place. I like to use the album/photo description boxes as well as the tagging features to store extra information about my photos.
2. Absolute favorites get printed and put in frames – Instead of always adding new frames (though I sometimes do), I like to rotate the latest pics in and out of my existing frames. Removed photos get put in an archival photo box. This category is for truly outstanding images, generally great portraits of one or more family members and sometimes, remarkable landscapes.
3. Tell your stories – Though they say a picture is worth 1000 words, your story will need the written word to be remembered for generations to come. You can do this with the online descriptions I mentioned above, or you can take it to the next level with photobooks or scrapbooks. I count on my Flickr account to provide the full record, but I enjoy digital scrapbooking as a way to creatively honor my memories.
I’ll go into more detail in my next post.
Thanks so much! I like the way you think :)
Remember, even external hard drives fail. I recently lost two 500 gb external hard drives and a lot of photos along with them. They don’t have fans so they overheat and die. I’ve since installed a 750 gb internal hard drive inside my computer. I burn my photos onto dvd’s then print out thumbnail sheets, put them in a binder using dividers with pockets and keep the cd or dvd in the pocket. You can label them with the date you burned the cd or dvd. You can easily peruse the thumbnails to find the picture you’re looking for then the cd in in the divider pocket.