1. Choose what medium you want to store them on/in. There are so many options it’s tough to choose.
Hard Drives : Personally I have mine all on a hard drive as well as in the cloud (I love the SanDisk portable SSD 2 TB).
Clouds : Clouds are great! Easily accessible from a computer or phone, a cloud is also a security backup in case I lose the hard drive. I use Microsoft OneDrive because 1TB of storage comes free with Microsoft Office 365 which most of us use anyway. Dropbox is another great option with a sleek desktop and phone app.
iPhone : I only keep the past 2-3 years on my iPhone as I find iCloud expensive and I don’t like scrolling through thousands of photos on my phone.
Home Clouds : If you don’t like using Clouds but you want to be able to access your photos from anywhere then a home cloud is like a large personal hard drive that you keep connected to your wifi box. You can access it remotely – just as you would iCloud or Dropbox. The best of these is the WD My Cloud Home range which I also use for day to day backups of my laptops, but they can be buggy and need a little regular maintenance to ensure they work smoothly.
2. Get them all in one place!
Dig around and you will find that you have photos everywhere. The past decade or so on your phone/cloud and the rest on those little storage cards that came with the digital cameras, on hard drives you used to back up old pc’s, random USB keys lying around the place. And, of course, photo albums or shoe boxes full of actual printed photos. Try to find them all so that they can all be filed and organized together.
3. How to store them.
Photo apps - Some people love the apple ‘Photos’ app on mac/iPhone/iPad. It is easy to use and intuitive with face recognition, the option to create folders and much more. You can upload your older photos to your photos app too, even if you didn’t take them with your iPhone. But.... it syncs everything to iCloud which will take up a lot of costly storage. However, you can create additional ‘Libraries’ that don’t sync to iCloud. That way you can use the Photos app, but without seeing every photo you ever took when scrolling through your phone.
Folders and Files – I like to store my photos in good old fashioned folders. I create them by year, then by event/group. This is also a great way to create photo books. Look for 2018/Ibiza and there are all your photos ready to be used to create an album of holiday memories.
Other sites, clouds and apps – I won’t list them all, but there are some amazing options like Flickr and Photobucket and Google Photos.
4. Duplicate removal
We all have duplicates and similars. Especially of older photos from cameras. We loaded them onto our pc’s, then copied and backed up, then found the card and uploaded again and soon we have 5 copies of Aunty Hilda asleep after Christmas lunch in 2007. Nowadays we have 35 pictures of a baby in an attempt to get that one perfect smile.
Once you’ve organized your photos into one place, use a duplicate remover tool to tody them up. There are loads of duplicate apps but I like PhotoSweeper. It scans from folders, a hard drive, USB key or your Photos album then searches for the duplicates and/or similars and can either intelligently choose which ones to remove, or you can select yourself. It can be time consuming, but it can also take 25,000 photos down to 12,000 in a matter of a few hours.
4. Sort and Edit
Be ruthless – you don’t need 100 photos of every event you go to and you don’t need 10 videos of a concert. Sort, edit, delete and organise. You can also rename, tag people and places, whatever is meaningful to you. Do it regularly and it really won’t take long.
5. PRINT !
There is no greater gift than a photo album full of memories. Print photobooks for your kids, parents and friends that they will treasure. Make albums of holidays and trips with titles and descriptions to help you remember the wonderful times you had. It’s amazing that we have these tiny devices full of photos but flicking through an album or having a perfect photo in a frame on the wall is way more special.
And if all this sounds daunting, or you just don't have the time or patience, call www.webbconsulting.mc and I'll come and help you create beautiful, organised and meaningful memories out of your thousands of photos. #webbconsulting#webbmonaco
Subscribe to this blog for more helpful hints and tech tips!
Comments