When our oldest was a baby, I was diligent about loading digital photos onto my computer and labeling each with a complicated list of names, places, and our daughter’s age in weeks. Needless to say, this became way too much to keep up with. For one thing, any time the photos were grouped and alphabetized, they became a jumbled mess. Then, of course, as the parenting journey continues, there are way more photos and way less time.
So, after a lot of thought, this is my current system:
–I *try* to delete photos as I go. This is challenging since I dislike being on my phone and there’s little time for it. But if I can delete fuzzy photos or closed-eye pics along the way, it makes photos easier to manage down the road.
–Upload photos onto the computer frequently; I can’t stand keeping them on my phone.
–I use an outdated photo program called Aperture, which I love! I have folders for each year and then monthly “albums” within those. I label photos a group at a time (by month) and put them into an album of the same name. To keep things in easy order I label them this way:
year–# month
So, for example, photos from January 2019 would read like this:
2019-01 January
(I always put a zero in front of months 1-9, so that they will stay in alphabetical order.)
–Special events or trips with lots of photos are labeled in a similar fashion but with an extension.
ex. 2018-09 September-Family Reunion
–I also have folders for any screenshots or misc. photos. (I take a lot of screenshots…) These have labels like, Art, Music, Books, Gift Ideas, Health, Recipes, Other Families, Texts, etc. This helps keep those photos out of our monthly collections.
–I try my best to use programs like Dropbox or Backblaze to make sure our photos are safe, since at this point, they are the things I’d be the most disappointed to lose if something happened to the computer.
–I’ve tried my best at keeping up with family photo albums too, since I promised myself I wouldn’t be working on the kids’ baby albums when they were graduating college. BUT, I totally get it now. I do. It’s super tough, and I want to be spending my time living in the present. I do my best though. I used to order mounds of photos to do scrapbook-type albums, but I couldn’t keep these organized. Now, I create albums on Shutterfly ahead of time (in theory…), so that when “Free Extra Pages” sales come up, I’m ready. Our family albums tend to be BIG. In fact, I had to start breaking the albums into two per year, and now three. eek! But once they’re done, it feels SO great to have them and know that they’re stored online as well. These, of course, also started with way more detail–labels and stories off to the side. Now, they have the months typed at the beginning of each section, and that’s about it. I love that there is the ability to add a title to the spine though. This option is great for our shelf of albums. I try to keep the spines in a consistent format, but I keep changing my mind on them. Currently, they read something like 2017 January-June
Anyway, just thought I’d share some of my photo process, since it seemed to take me awhile to get it sorted out. Hopefully, this can give some of you some ideas to work with for your own systems!