Online Picture Organization
If you don’t know me by now, I love organization. I like everything in my house to have it’s own spot, I can’t stand clutter and I do a “spring cleaning” about 4+ times a year. Crazy? Maybe. But I like the feeling of knowing where everything is.
But now that so much of our lives are online I really have been focusing on how to get my “online” life just as organized as my “offline” life. This is especially true about my pictures. I have tons; I’m talking 1000′s of pictures that I need organized and backed up. At first I really didn’t know where to start so I decided to jump right in and start organizing them into folders. First by year, then month, then by events.
For example:
- 2012
- Jan.
- Caden’s first haircut
- Feb.
- Charleston Beach Trip
- Ohio Trip
- Mar.
- Apr.
- May
- Mothers Day
- Jun.
- Jan.
Backup
Once I had them all organized I uploaded them (by year, month, and events) to my external hard drive. I wanted something on hand and large enough to store all our family pictures in. It was surprisingly really fast, it literally took a couple minutes to pull all the photos on to the hard drive. Now I can go directly to the year or month and pull any pictures I may need without taking up so much space on my computer.
Online Storage
Source – krazycouponlady.com
I then uploaded all my pictures to Shutterfly. I like having a place online for all my pictures in case, god forbid a fire or natural disaster occurs at our house. The last thing I want to be thinking about in an emergency situation is our pictures. This is also great when I’m re-doing my picture frames or I just need a couple prints here or there. It’s super easy and quick to order up a few prints. Heck, if I’m really feeling lazy they’ll deliver it right to my front door. Talk about convenience!
Photo Albums
And the last thing I do (or plan on doing) is to make a photo album. I’m just about finished with my first one (My Pregnancy with Caden) and I have already started on one about CK’s First Year. I plan on making one each year so we can remember all the fun things we did throughout the year.
Now that I got my plan down and my pictures organized, I’m hoping I’ve covered all my bases! What do you think? Am I missing something?
How do you backup and organize all your family photos?
Category: Organization
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kkrup
Twitter: Momentspassslow
says:
Love this!! One tip – I use the same system but title my albums 2012.01.firsthaircut – that way when I sort them they are sorted by date and crazy anal organized!!
Colleen C recently posted..Fourty
Which website are you using for you photobooks? I would like to start doing the same thing; sort of like a Family Scrapbook. I am scoping out website right now to get a headstart on 2012, but I’m a little worried about price. Any recommendations?
Right now I’m using Shutterfly since I am already uploading my photos there. I did have my photos on Kodak Gallery but they were bought out by Shutterfly. I like them a lot so far, it’s an easy to use system but I haven’t seen them printed yet. I’ll keep you posted! I’ve also used Blurb to make a book for one of my friends and that book turned out super cute!
I learned this lesson the hard way. I had a ton of photos on my computer but hadn’t backed them up onto an external hard drive and we lost all of them!!! We also lost all of our iTunes ($100s of dollars worth of songs)! Anyways, now I print all photos right away rather than let them sit on a memory card and I also upload them to Snapfish (I like that site better than Shutterfly).
I like your system but for me I wouldn’t remember in 10 years when his first haircut was, so I would have a folder of “Firsts” instead.
Having a folder of first is a great idea! I might have to do that as well. Thanks for the tip!
Twitter: emilytsutton
says:
I am kind of a photo nerd and love making scrapbooks and photo albums. i have made several Shutterfly photo books – 1 “Before You Were Born” (all of the showers, ultrasounds, prepping for baby, bump photos – probably very similar to yours), 1 with just our maternity shoot photos, 1 “My First Year” with his monthly photos that also served as a guest book at his 1st birthday (and a few travel ones, too). I also used the Project Life system to catalog Parker’s first year month-by-month with actual physical photos (find out more here: http://www.beckyhiggins.com/products/what-is-project-life.php) and written out journaling that I NEVER would’ve remembered b/c I didn’t blog.
Let me know if you ever wanna see any of them to get ideas; I can also send you a Shutterfly link.
I organize my photos simply by month, which isn’t always the easiest reference-wise, but simplest. I also back up on a hard drive. But something about making books (printed and otherwise) is really satisfying for me.