Getting your digital photos organised

Posted by Linda Gransby on

pile of photos

Now is a great time to think about creating some new, simple time saving routines to make your photo taking and scrapbooking life easier.

Here’s some suggestions to start you off....

 

Edit and cull your photos regularly.

For normal day to day life, I review what I've captured once a week.  If I'm on a travel trip I review and delete at the end of each day. This saves me so much time wading through months and months of photos when I’m looking for images to print for my scrapbooks and saves my sanity too!

You're looking to immediately delete blurred and poor-quality photos on the first pass through....   Then think about thinning your images further by deleting duplicates and boring photos, just keep a small selection of each activity.

 

Backup your photos.

I'm hoping I'm preaching to the converted....  but if not, NOW is the best time to start....   Having a backup will save you loads of time and money and no to mention anguish, if or when a disaster strikes your computer drive.

Think about where you can store a second copy of your images, for instance that might be an external hard drive or cloud storage such as Dropbox or Onedrive.

Please don't rely on social media such as Facebook to 'store' your photos, for two reasons:

  1. Facebook photos are downloaded at a very low quality, not suitable for printing so no good for scrapbooks.....
  2. Social media platforms can shut your profile in an instant without telling you or with any recourse for you to get it back.

 

Label your photos.

By having a set system for filing your digital photos, you will save time searching for the trip to the seaside you took last year, or your family summer BBQ, keep it filed and labelled....

This could be as simple as renaming your downloaded photos to a more meaningful filename rather than IMG000202202.jpg.

I organise my photos into yearly folders, and then further into months and subjects.  An alternative is to set up folders based on activities you do or places you visit....

 

I hope this helps, if you have any questions, drop over to our Facebook group: Craft and Chat with Linda, and ask away