The best way to organize your digital photos
Organizing and storing all your digital photos can be confusing, even over whelming! To help I am reposting a link to Gizmodo’s excellent post on this topic (link) : “Field guide” on “The Best Way To Organize All Your Digital Photos”
Reading this guide will probably help you and is a great place to start you thinking about how to manage your pics. Definitely think about what “cloud” options are out there as they mention in the piece. iCloud and Google Photos are good solutions for organizing and backup of your picks (even using both) Guess what, folks. Google Photos is free! Thats right, Google offers you free unlimited storage (and backup) of ALL your photos at not cost. Apple charges you for cloud storage over 5GB but its still pretty cheap for 50GB (0.99/month). Dropbox is fine too for backup and storage.
Less Is More
One thing I’ve found among my clients is that a good many people seem to amass what seems to me at least, to be enormous amounts of pictures and videos. I’m talking about people who have 30,000-60,000 photos in their Photo Library. That number to me is astounding, but most people with that many don’t seem to think so, they think this is normal to have 60,000 pictures of the kids.
Wait – 60,000 pictures of your kids? How is this possible? Well if you think about it, its not terribly hard to get there once you do the math.
Why? It is now simply so “easy” to click a picture with your phone. Keep taking say “only” 100 pictures a day… and what happens? Do The Math. In just a year you could have 36,500 pictures! In 2 years, and its 70,000+ pictures.
So for me, a big part of the equation is once you take a picture, what happens to them? They have to “go somewhere” right? Yes, they do. They are stored on your computer and/or your phone. When people ask me, why is my computer so full? Or why is my phone full? (50-100 pictures snapped a day?) Often the simple answer in most cases is they take a picture and think the process is over. For me, taking a picture is only the first step in a process.
The next step- which is super important as its crucial to data management – is EDITING your photos.
In my view, once you take some pictures, the next step will be editing them. Baby editing steps? Look through ALL your photos. Delete the obvious photo mistakes : black shots, finger over the lens, blurry pix, too dark, too light, out of focus…etc. I frequently find people have a hundred (or 1000+) of these mistakes in their Photo Library. You just need to look through your pictures on a regular basis. The next editing step is a bit more difficult: Say you find 6 pictures of almost the same exact shot? Force yourself to delete 4 or 5 of the six by picking the “best” of the set. I have learned from my youthful camera-mad photographer days using a 35mm film camera (Minolta, Olympus…) to be a good editor and by good I mean I am “ruthless” photo editor. Its not a bad trait to have, be ruthless with yourself and your photographs.
You want quality, not quantity! It will pay off with highly “curated” photographs. If you can do this, and keep it as part of your photo life workflow, you will not have 60k pictures; Maybe you can pare the number down… to say only 5,000 really, really good ones! Don’t spend hours, at a time. Spend 20 minutes every now and then. Get into the habit and it will pay off.
