A few weeks ago I did some poles on Instagram asking about your digital media storage and your physical prints. You guys I was pleasantly surprised by some of the results and worried for you all by others!
First off let me just say that I am in no way an expert in this area and I do not have all the answers. This is the system that I have found that works best for me and the time that I have to devote to this. Take what works best for you and run with it.
Second let me share some results with you. Here are the questions I asked along with the results:
Are your digital photos organized and accessible? 49% said yes and 51% said no
Are your physical prints organized and accessible? 25% said yes and 75% said no
What do you use to take the majority of your photos? 90% said phone 10% said camera
Are your digital photos backed up anywhere? 73% said yes and 27% said no
Do you do anything with your digital photos (ex. chatbooks, yearly photo books, etc.)? 29% said yes and 71% said no
I am going to break this up in sections since it can be overwhelming to try and tackle it all at one time, trust me! At the beginning of the year I set a goal to get all of my printed photos AND digital files organized. Let me just preface this with letting you all know that I am SUPER good at backing up and organizing all of my clients photos. Like it drives my husband crazy how many copies I have of them. It’s my personal stuff that gets pushed to the side and I never do anything with and that makes me so sad! I want my kids to have access to all of these amazing memories that I capture for them not have them be lost forever sitting on the computer. Let’s dive into digital files today, specifically photos.
Ready? OK! Here we go!
Step 1: Just Start I know that it is so overwhelming when you are behind by months or even years. I had close to 9 years of digital photos that we scattered between old disks, external hard drives and folders on my computer. I told my self to take it slow and that any progress was better than no progress at all. Some days I only made it through 1 disk or folder. But that was a little closer than the day before.
My husband is a computer pro and deals with storage and backups at his job so I recruited him to help me figure out what hardware would be the best for me. We ended up purchasing a RAID Controller storage system and it has been amazing. Basically it houses multiple hard drives and writes your data to however many you assign it to. I have mine set up to copy to 3 drives. You can control the frequency of when it backups your data and if one of your drives ever fails you can breathe easy knowing that the same data is also on another hard drive. I love this set up since it requires no extra work on my part. I export my images to my hard drive and the RAID takes care of the rest.
Step 2: Gather Old Disks, External Drives, Etc. I went through everything and found all of my disks, hard drives, etc that had photos on them and made a pile. I told myself that I would take at least 1 hour a week (usually on Sundays) to work on sorting through all of these images. On my external hard drive that we set up I made a folder for each year, inside of that folder I made folders for each month. I would go through each disk and copy the images from the disk to the correct folder on my external . When I had gone through the whole disk I wrote on there “Transferred to external 2019”. That way if little hands ever got into my piles it wasn’t a big deal and I knew what I had already been through. When I finished with all of the disks I just stuck them in a storage box and placed them in our safe. One big job complete.
Now for the external hard drives. The new system that my husband set up for me will automatically make multiple copies of each drive and it was just easier to have them all in one place than on multiple little drives. I did the same thing as with the disks. Opened one folder at a time and copied it to my new drive.
I will admit this process was SO much slower than I was hoping it would be. It could be that I take WAY to many photos, the fact that I was 9 years behind or that I would get sucked into the rabbit hole of looking at every single picture and going down memory lane. Either way it took me a good few months to get through it all. Just remember that progress is progress. Be patient with yourself and eventually you will get through it. I was actually surprised at the results of this question from my pole…half of you are already on top of this! Good for you!
Step 3: Photos on your Phone From our survey we can see that 90% of us use our phones to capture our everyday memories (not surprised at all by this one!). But the convenience of it can easily become a huge mess if we let it.
First of all…PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make sure that you are backing your images from your phone up somewhere! Phones are great until the unexpectedly die and then you are stressed about all of your photos.
I personally use Google Photos to backup my phone images and have it set up to do that automatically. I love that I can search by specific keywords or phrases, date, etc for an image. There are two options for backups, free and paid. The free option is great and offers unlimited storage but at a reduced file size. I chose to go for the paid backups. For $1.99 a month I get full resolution backups. There are many other options for backups that are equally as great this is just what I have chosen to use.
Google will automatically backup every image from your phone, including screenshots, downloads, etc. You can choose which folders you want backup up from your phone, you will find this in the settings menu under Back up & Sync and then Back up device folders. I do find that I take WAY to many unnecessary photos on my phone so I do try to go through my google photos often and delete images that are similar to each other or that I no longer need.
Are you ready to jump in? I promise once you start it will get easier with time. Getting your photos organized feels so good and is much easier to stay on top of when you have a system.
I want to challenge all of you to tackle one month’s worth of photos this week. Give yourself 30 minutes and see what you can accomplish. And please if you have any questions or need help just let me know!