Organize Your Photo Collection Like a Boss

If you’re like most people, you probably have thousands of digital photos stored on a computer or hard drive. Not to mention all of those printed photos you have in boxes in your closet! Have you ever been searching for that one photo and the few minutes you thought it would take to find it turns into an hour?

6 TIPS FOR ORGANIZING YOUR PHOTOS

Taking the time to develop a system that will help you better organize your photos will end up saving you hours in the future. Here are some helpful tips to get you started: 

1. Find All Printed Photos. If you have printed images, find every single one that you want to preserve and digitize. Go through all prints and family albums. Considering reaching out to other family members to locate more photographs.

2. Digitize Printed Photos. Once you locate all the photos, use a good-quality scanner to scan the photos in high resolution.

3. Locate Digital Photos. Do a clean-up. Go through every device, starting from your smartphone all the way to external drives to locate every digital photograph you have. If you’re generally a happy snapper, it might be time to set a few hours aside and carefully go through your photos and get rid of the images that are out of focus or aren’t of anything significant. This exercise will help you get organized and free up some space on your devices. 

4. Use a Single Storage Device. No matter how many photos you have, it is best to put them all in a single storage device. If your current storage device has insufficient storage, buy an external hard drive with enough capacity to fit your entire photo library.

5. Use a Solid Folder Structure. Once you put all the photos in a single location, come up with an easy-to-remember folder structure that you can use consistently for all your photos today and in the future. I recommend splitting your photos into folders organized by year and event name.

4. Start with the year. In order to really get organized, you’re going to need to start creating some folders on your computer. Start with a folder for a specific year and create folders for each of the 12 months within it. You can now create folders within each month folder that speak to different events, vacations or impromptu pet photoshoots that took place during those months. For example, if you went on a skiing trip in January 2015, your folder structure would be: 2015 > January > Family Ski Trip. This folder structure will make it much easier to find your favorite memories. 

5. Organize All Photos. After you decide on the folder structure, go through all the images that you previously scanned, as well as your digital photos, then organize them. This is going to be the most time-consuming process.

6. Backup Your Photos. Now that you have all the photos properly organized by folders, it is time to back them up. Use several local storage locations to back up your photos. Also, consider using online cloud storage to store another backup.

It’s also important to download and create backups of your photos on a regular basis. You always want at least one backup copy of your most precious memories as those photos are something that you’ll never be able to get back should your computer or hard drive crash. Ideally, you should have two external hard drives for storing your images, as well as a cloud based service. "Hope for the best, plan for the worst."