These days we all take thousands of photos and videos each year but do you have a system for organising them? Here is how I do it ….
Taking a photo is not the hard bit … its finding them again when you need them that I find difficult. And I dread losing all of my precious memories if a phone goes missing or a computer dies. I am not perfect but i have now put some systems in place to hopefully avoid that happening.
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Setup Some Cloud Storage
The first step in my plan is to have an automatic backup happening of both the photos on my phone and the ones that I take on my camera. There are lots of popular systems but I have settled on Google Photos as the best solution for me. Its also possible that if you have 100% Apple devices in your home that iCloud could work too but many people have at lease a few non-Apple devices.
Google Photos is an online photo storage system that keeps unlimited high resolution images for you and that you can search by date or any word. It has amazing image recognition and face recognition. I can type a search like “Adam coffee” and it will find all the photos it thinks match that search which is great when I am looking for something later.
Did I mention that its FREE haha …
There are apps for Apple and android mobile devices that automatically upload any photos or videos that you take to Google Photos when you are back in WiFi (at least that is what I have it set to do). I know everything is at least in 2 places then.
Similarly they have a little application for you computer so anything that I put into my Pictures folder on my computer gets backed up to Google Photos too. When I move pics from my camera for example, they get uploaded.
Another awesome feature of Google Photos is that you can easily make albums from your pics and then share them with others in a secure controlled way. Just be aware that there is some privacy risk with any online storage so you are taking that small risk. I’m happy with it.
You can even share the account on your partner’s devices so that all the family images end up together … plus you can spy on each other haha
On My Computer
Now that i know all of my images are getting backed up and cataloged online, I simply make year folders on my computer for my local storage …. .2015, 2016 etc – I dump all of my pictures in there in folders by date of when I took them. I try to clear out any blurry or duplicate images at this stage to save having too much storage wasted.
I regularly backup that local storage too just in case to a small portable hard drive (under $100 at an electronic retailer).
Finally …
Each year our family has a tradition of making a slideshow of our top memory photos of the year … the limit is 1 song so it makes you really decide on the absolute best 60-100 photos. This is great becasue it forces me to do an annual review and to pic those images i love. I then back these up again to another spot … if everything else fails, I have those best pics. I also print a photobook of the year.
You may not be as crazy paranoid as I am but if nothing else, think about the automatic storage online as a great easy way to keep your pics together.
