A Kitchen and An Apprentice

Back on the topic of organization, we’re tackling digital photos. I have a little bit of a personal motto that’s essentially, you’re going to have to do the work anyway, so you might as well be organized up front so that you can work in the most efficient manner.  I need to think of a better way to summarize this thought. But I’ll give an example.  Let’s take menu planning. If you want to eat homemade meals, you’re going to have to have a plan.  In the absence of a plan, you’ll have to shop for each meal in advance of cooking.  I live in the suburbs where grocery stores are close, and even as such, a trip to the store is 10-20 minutes in each direction, plus I’d spend at least 20 minutes shopping.  That’s nearly an hour added to a normal workday of wasted time.  So instead, I create a meal plan each week and then just execute against it.  If our plans change for that night or we don’t feel like what’s on the menu, we just switch it up and trade out days.  Doing the work upfront allows you to think about what you must do, consolidate activities, and be planful about it.  In the end, it saves you time and effort.  You set yourself up versus reacting to a need.

I’ll admit, photo organization is a bit daunting. Between devices and websites, my photos were scattered. And then how do you organize your folder system? Is it better to have chronological organization or event bases?

In tackling this area, I had a couple of motivators and goals:

• It was critical to get things backed up and offline, especially professional photos and videos that we invested in
• It’d be helpful to have things organized, all in one place, so that when I wanted a photo, I could easily find it
• My phone had long been running beyond the free iCloud limits, which was limiting the storage I had available for new photos
• I didn’t want an online cloud solution.  The cost, stability, and security of the photos just wasn’t worth it to me.

Here are a few steps to help you tackle this over time – because you probably won’t be able to get it done in one day or one weekend. I think it took me two weeks, working on it here and there.

1. Decide how you want to store your photos. I opted for a large (4 TB) external hard drive. I may not need that much space, but I have high resolution professional photos from our wedding, a wedding highlight reel, and a video of our wedding ceremony. These eat up space fast and it seems like every year, the typical size of an iPhone photo increases. I’d rather have one place where all my digital photos and videos are organized versus adding devices as my collection grows. And then I bought a second one as a back-up. Because as they say, “one is none, two is one.”
2. Transfer photos from existing hard drives to your chosen storage solution.  This is probably the easiest step. Because if you’ve already got them saved to an external drive, they’re probably already somewhat organized.
3. Transfer photos from your (and family member’s) phones to your chosen storage solution. This was one of the harder steps. I’m a naturally anal-retentive person, so I had already gone through many of my photos and chosen the best of multiple images, deleted screenshots that I no longer needed, and just generally filtered through my phone photos. My husband is more inclined to save history and keep all photos. We balance each other well. Nonetheless, this is the most difficult and time-consuming step of organizing your photos. You don’t want to store photos that aren’t useful – those will just take up space on the drive that you can grow into.  And you’ll want to make sure you’re organizing chronologically. It’s a bit tedious when transferring photos from phones.
4. Organize your photos among folders. I thought about this for some time and didn’t come up with a perfect solution. Again, do you organize chronologically or by event?  In the end, I opted to go with a chronological folder structure.  Essentially, I created a folder for each year and then created subfolders that represented groupings of photos (event, holiday, etc.).  This helped me retain the year the photo was taken, organized photos by date – which often helps you recall where to find a photo.  The downside, however, is I couldn’t quickly go to all our Montana trips, for instance.
5. Duplicate what you’ve created on one external drive to the second, if you’d like a back-up. Once you’ve organized your photos and transferred them all to one place, duplicate your photos to a second hard drive. You’ll have to keep these mirror images going forward, so store them together.