Last week I embarked on a project to finally get our digital pictures organized and to print picture books. I had purchased a groupon for a photo book, and I planned to do one per year for 2008, 2009 and 2010.
Here’s the problem. Our pictures are completely disorganized! Well, that is the main problem. Other problems include the fact that our camera is CRAP and therefore so are all of our pictures, and also if you looked at our pictures, you would think my husband is a single dad (who takes his kids to do really fun stuff) because their mom is nowhere to be seen! AND, it became clear to me that we don’t take nearly enough pictures. The everyday moments are the important ones, and that’s what we miss (other than what we catch on our cell phones, ha).
Anyway, back to the disorganization. First of all, our pictures are spread out among at least four computers and three online archives. They are not all in one place. And frankly, I’m sure I forget where some of them are. Also, they are in no particular order, the file names are meaningless, and there are a dozen terrible pictures for every good one.
After a ton of work, I finally got the last couple of years organized on Flickr, and grouped into sets and collections. However, there are more where those came from! And I know Flickr isn’t a good long-term solution, and I need to have them backed up on something that’s in our possession.
I know it sounds silly, but this whole thing is causing me some serious anxiety, so always, I am turning to all of you smart people!
How do you organize your digital photos?
How do you back them up?
How do you print/display them? In actual old school photo albums, photo books or do you just let them live on your computer?
How do you weed out the bad pictures?
How do you make sure you are capturing your kids’ childhood on film and/or video?
I think this all boils down to that last question. I am terrified I am letting our memories disappear.
Wow Emily! That’s a huge achievement to get them organized. I’ll share how I do mine, to see if it helps. When I download I put the date (1-4-11) and something to jog my memory about what’s inside the folder. I then put them into a larger folder for each month. At the end of the year, I put them into yet another folder for that year. Did that make sense?
I display my most recent (and a few older ones) on the digital photo frame the kids got me for Mother’s Day. That way I don’t need to print thousands of pics. Otherwise, every quarter I get all my favorite pictures put onto a photo CD. I know you can do this yourself, but I’m not that tech savvy.
I use iPhoto on my Mac. It automatically creates events when you import photos and now it has a cool feature that can show you all of the pictures that a single person might be in. I don’t really weed out the bad pictures, I tend to keep everything. I back them up using an external hard drive with time machine.
Hope this helps!
I always back up all of my pictures on a flash drive. I do need to work on organizing the file names, though! I do picture books for special events, but for the most part, I do an old school photo album. I still love to go to my parents’ house and look through our old photo albums, so I kind of want my kids to have that. Whenever I needed a picture for a school project, I could easily slide it out of the album and then return it when I was finished. I imagine my kids coming home for a picture for a school project and I have to scroll through 17 flash drives to find it, then print it and pick it up at a store, all in time for tomorrow’s class!…no thanks! I welcome any new ideas, too, though!
I have my camera set up to create its own folder each day, so whenever I take pictures, the camera already organizes them into folders for me….. then, I copy those photos on to my hard drive. If your camera doesn’t do that, you can just separate them yourself by date.
I separate each section by the month, and name the folders like this: 01 January 2010, 02 February 2010; so that the folders line up in succession.
Within each monthly folder, each date with the event is separated out; the folder could read like this: 01-15 Zoo, so each of those folders show up in succession.
You could use a program like Picasa to present all of your folders on one page, and you can edit them right then and delete the ones you don’t think you will EVER use. (I have to try to be real honest with myself about that, so I don’t keep a million files.)
You can copy these files onto another hard drive or DVDs that you should always keep in a separate location, so if there’s a fire or something, you’ll have a backup somewhere else.
It sounds like a lot of work, but after saving my files like this for several years now, it’s SUPER easy to find anything I need, and I feel good about having a good system down.
I have an external hard drive that I use to keep all my pictures on. They come in varying sizes. Get a 1TB and that should hold anything you could ever want. It’s pretty much like a flash drive on crack. 🙂
Before I got it, I had a big scare! My laptop stopped working and I had to watch my hubby take it apart knowing all my pics were in there. I went and got my external drive the next day!!
I use Picasa to import and organize photos. When you import, it puts the pictures in folders by date, or you can choose folder names. And the best part is, it has FACIAL RECOGNITION. That’s right, it recognizes people’s faces and automatically puts them in folders (with a little help from you at first, but then it does really well at recognizing). We have a 1 terabyte external hard drive that I back up both our computers on, but I almost never print photos. I have 2 electronic photo frames that never work, so most of our pictures live on the computer.
My way is not particularly scientific but it works.
I upload all my photos into a Digital Photos folder on my compter, in a folder of the year (2010) and then in a sub folder with the month (1, 2, 3, etc.) I dump all the photos there, then I sort all the ones I want to print into a Print sub-folder. From the Print folder, I use Photoshop to optimize and shrink about 5-10 photos for Facebook, saving them in a different subfolder.
I back them up–along with every other item on my computer, using Carbonite. It has saved my life many times over (and it is accessible from anywhere.)
When I upload the photos into my computer I put them in Lightroom and organize them by date. When a month has gone by I then burn a disc of the month and keep in in a binder of other discs. The bad photos, just delete them. I have been known to save a bad photo or two and edit the heck out of them to get them to look different, but not often.
Remember it’s quality not quantity. I would rather have one nice photo that captures a day than 100 really bad ones. I never understand when people put blurry photos up on facebook or flickr, but I am sure that there is a reason.
Some of the photos I print up and hang. Others I print into books (I don’t do that often enough) I do scrapbook as well. I also create year end DVDs set to music with 60 or so of my favorite photos from that year.
Also, the photos don’t have to be your kids looking at you cheesing it up (not that yours are) I like the fly on the wall approach. I also love to take photos that symbolize things and trigger memories.
Just don’t stress, relax….deep breath. Whatever photos you have are photos you wouldn’t have otherwise if you didn’t take them.
We use an external hard drive to store, but I organize them all on my computer before saving.
I organize by event when appropriate (i.e. Skating with the Stars, Christmas 2010) and by month if it’s random photos that don’t fall into a category. Save each picture with the date. 🙂
Here’s what I do:
To organize: I use Picasa to organize and sort. I organize the photos by year, then folders of date the event. So in the 2010 folder I have a folder called 12-10 Christmas. I put the month first so that the computer will automatically sort by date…but make sure you have a 0 in front of numbers 1-9. If you don’t add the zero it will sort it like 1,10,11,12,2,3 instead of 01,02,03,… I add the event since it makes it easier to find.
I typically keep the past couple of months on the laptop and add the to the backup external hard drive. I like keeping a copy of the past couple of months so I have easy access if I’m not near the exteranl hard drive. I also backup the photos via FTP to Photobucket. This is nice for people who need to download an entire folder if they were at the event. I can also access the folders on my phone and share. I usually set the FTP to load to Photobucket when I go to bed and it uploads over night. Photobucket cost $35 per year unlimited space. You can also order High Resolutions of your photos on DVD. I had an external hard drive crash and this save my 2008 photos that year. Since I also do web design on the side, I back up the external hard drive through elephant drive. Elephant Drive is the only off site back up that will back up external hard drives. This way I can work remotely on web site on the net book without having to load the net book up with files. Elephant drive is an automatic system so you just have to let the system run in the background for it to work.
Let me know if you have questions.
Hope this help.
I have my camera set to make a new folder each month. So when I have the opportunity to download them to my computer, I can put them into folders by month. Of course, i have to be a little more diligent with my phone because it doesn’t have that option. Then after a year, I can put the 12 folders into one year folder. I typically keep a year’s worth on my computer for uploading to facebook, making g’parent presents, Christmas presents, etc. But I end up backing them up on my external harddrive which I keep in our fireproof safe.
Prints? I don’t have many of those. Mainly given as gifts or if there is a special at a drugstore or something for larger prints. However, this IS when the “good ones” come into play. When I decide to print is when I decide which ones are good and only upload those good ones to the website to print. I don’t delete any pictures. Because in the future it may be the “good” picture but for a completely different reason. 🙂
I have used the digital picture frames. But I think they are too right and I don’t like the idea of it running all night and I don’t want to bother myself with turning it on and off all the time.
HTH
i organize my photos by month. at the end of the month i sit down and import all my pics from the cards on all cameras, including the one my daughter has, and all cell phones too. i just put them into a folder named that particular month-year. i don’t delete any bad pictures unless they are of me of course :). i want my girls to be able to see all the good and all the crazy pics too. i don’t really use video that much except on my cell – you can never capture that “great” moment unless its at that second and i always have my phone on me. if i waited to get the camera for video, i would never have any videos. i don’t print any pics really ever. once every couple of months i will burn a cd/dvd for relatives of all the pics for a year or whatnot and send/give it to them. i will set my screen saver to rotate through a month’s worth of pictures though, which is really kinda cool. i back up all my photos and anything important on mozy. i just downloaded their program and it AUTOMATICALLY back ups every couple of hours during the day. i never have to think about it again. it’s free up to a limited amount of space and costs very minimal for unlimited space. and it works!! seriously, my laptop was stolen and i downloaded my documents and photos and was able to breathe again.
I never comment on any blog… ever.. But I couldn’t help myself on this!
You really have a problem, but as soon as you start you’ll find how easy and fun it is and it should be!
This is how I do mine:
Every month I empty my camera, and both mine and my husband’s Iphones into a single folder in the computer (e.g 2010_11_Family Pics ). The folders always starts with the year and the month so it stays in chronological order in the computer. If there was a bigger event with a lot of pics on it such as a b-day, a trip, or even a beautiful day in the park I make a separate folder for it (e.g. 2010_11_sunny day or 2010_10_Amanda b-day) that way I keep my pics on my possession and I don’t depend on any specific software that would eventually discontinue.
Since I have a mac, It’s fun to use iphoto, so I import the folders I created as events in iphoto. i haven’t figured the faces regognition yet, but it seems fun… that’s my next step.
Also, every month I choose the best pics and put together using photoshop elements to make a few ( sometimes as few as 2 or 3 ) photo collages each one contaning between 2 and 6 poses, which I print in 4×6 regular format, so I can put them in regular photo albums and have them available for friends and family to browse in the living room. Also this way I can add some little notes telling our story directly on the pics.
For back up, as a mac user, I use time machine.
Hope I have helped Good luck in your project and have a great 2011.
Mine are all in popcorn cans, at least they don’t get folded that way, just curved!
How 20th century of me!!
UP
As soon as I take photos (or as soon as I can, but seriously, I don’t wait more than a day or so), I upload them to my computer. I put photos into folders by month, then by event. I’d love to be so on the ball that I uploaded them to Walmart.com every month (that’s where I print my pics because it’s the cheapest), but it’s more like every few months. What takes time is editing in Picasa.
I only print the good ones, because I scrapbook. I keep all the others digitally, though. I need to weed them out, but it’s so hard!
A couple times a year, I save all photos to CDs.
It’s not much a system (at least the backing up part), but it’s worked so far!