How To Organize Digital Photos

When it comes to organizing photos, getting a handle on the actual physical photos you have is one thing but digital photos are a beast of their own.  At first, digital photos seemed to be an easy thing to handle especially because people tend to put them on social media and organize them in albums there.  But what happens if social media goes down or you lose access to your page?  This is why getting organized with your digital photos is very important.
I recently went through and got all of my digital photos perfectly sorted and organized on my computer hard drive and it feels SO good because now I can easily maintain it all.  If you don't have a computer to store photos on then you may not find this post helpful.  The only advice I have for photos kept on your phone is to make sure you back it up somewhere and I don't just mean backing them up to the cloud.  The problem with the cloud is that you can backup and store a copy of them on there but it mirrors your phone and devices and if it starts syncing you can easily lose photos that you've deleted from the main place you stored them.  For photos you store on your phone I highly advice creating an account somewhere to store them permanently so you can free up space on your phone.  If you have to pay annually for storage space, it's a worth investment, I promise! 

 

For everyone else looking to sort through the endless collection of digital photographs in your computer folders, here's how you can get organized once and for all. 

 

Decide How To Separate Photos

Will you sort things by year or by subject?  This is completely up to you as an individual but the way I did it was organizing human photos by year (actually by decade then by year) and pet photos go in a separate folder that then gets organized by year.  For me that is what makes the most sense because I'm really good at referring to memories by the year they happened.  Once you decide how to separate and sort them, you can make your folders.  Start big then work your way to smaller collections.  I have a folder for the 2000s which contains an individual for the years from 2000 through 2010.  Then I have a 2010s folder for years 2011-2019.  Then I have a 2020s folder of course. Within the year folders I have photos that go by month or by event.  A wedding that I don't remember when it took place doesn't always have to be in a specific month.  Plus, when I look for those photos someday it will be easier to find them by simply looking for the name of the couple. I also have specific albums by subject for family photos and photos with my closest friends, especially ones of just them on their own or just them posing with me. This makes it super easy for me to pull up those photos if I want to make a collage for them as a gift.

 

Gather All Digital Photos

If you've been storing some on Facebook you can actually download each album and save it on your computer.  Get out your USB drives and memory cards and copy the photos on there over to your computer in batches. 

 

Start Sorting

Whether you start by copying specific Facebook albums over to the years the folder for the year they belong it or you just start one by one, this is the longest and most involved part of the process. Just start clicking and dragging.  If you're going by subject, that makes it much easier but if you're like me this method isn't helpful because let me just say I have SO MANY so going by subject than year for pets just makes more sense. 

 

As you sort, make sure to delete anything not worth saving.  Blurry photos and duplicates can take up precious space.  Keep only the best of your photos as those are the ones you'll prefer to look at in the future. 

Name Everything Cohesively

Once your photos are all sorted you can highlight the photos in each album and set them to be named a certain way. Look this up online if you aren't sure how to do it.  My photos get named by the folder they're in.  For example 2020-April-1.  You can set the number at the end of each photo to start at a certain value.  So it will automatically rename everything 1, 2, 3, etc.  This is nice because when you go to sort and arrange the photos your computer can easily do it in numerical order. Figure out what works for you with naming. 

Back It Up

Make sure you take backing up your hard drive very seriously. I pay $99 each year for BackBlaze which is constantly backing up my computer hard drive. You can easily download the zip file back on a new computer or onto an existing one if your hard drive acts up and you have to start over.  I avoid using Apple iCloud because I want everything saved on a hard drive not in a cloud and I don't like the fact that if I accidentally sync it one way or another I can lose things.  

After you do the initial organizing, you can even go through hard copy photos and digitalize them and when it comes to organize them you already have everything set up and ready to go.

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