If “organize your photos” is on your chore list then you might look at the endless stream of smartphone photos and think, “Oh, wow!” followed by “Do I really have time for this?!”
And after about 20 minutes, you turn your attention to a more fun project like planning your family’s summer vacation or making more coffee.
Try not to abandon the project before you get started! You’d be surprised at how 15-20 minutes a month will keep you organized and less stressed with organizing and viewing those cute snapshots of your friends and family.
1. Clean Out your Smart Phone
Delete those blurry photos while you’re waiting in line at the grocery or doctor’s office. You’ll instantly have fewer photos to download to your computer and won’t have to sift through a ton of bad snapshots.
2. Check Photos on a Monthly Basis
Whether you’re using iCloud, Google Photos or Dropbox, set a monthly calendar reminder to make sure your photos are syncing or you have downloaded the photos into the photo management system of your choice. Afterward, take 15 to 20 minutes to edit them ruthlessly. Only keep the truly special, funny, and beautiful photos and delete any duplicates.
3. File and Organize
Create Master folders for vacations, holidays, birthdays and everyday life. Sort by year, followed by the month. Ie: If a birthday was taken on July, 27th, 2011 – Put 2011 (07-27) Birthday. When organized by year, you’ll be able to sort the folders sequentially in any software, which is the best way to find older photos.
Also, make sure you back up your photos. This is a critical step to do, so don’t skip it, or one day, you could find all of those special memories gone. You can manually move photos to an external hard drive or to the cloud via DropBox. Another recommended program is Backblaze, which backs your computer up every time you connect to the internet.
