Pittsburgh Family Photographer and Filmmaker, Danielle Blewitt
With the convenience of phones, it has never been easier to document so much of our lives in photos and videos. As your family grows, naturally so does your collection of memories.
Do yourself a favor and adopt an easy-to-use organization system early on. Doing so will keep you from having a mess of photos and headaches years from now.
Why You Need to Organize Your Photos (Like Yesterday)
With the ease of access to cameras from cell phones to tablets and maybe even a “fancy camera”, it’s not hard to accumulate more photos than you know what to do with.
Kids grow fast and so does that collection of photos. The earlier you can start getting organized, the better. The future you will thank yourself!
Create a System That is Seamless and Easy-to-Use
Anytime you are implementing a system that you want to stick around, it has to be easy-to-use and fit seamlessly into you lifestyle. As busy parents, anything that can be automated should be!
Pick a simple way to capture, organize and protect your photos and videos (aka your valuable memories).
1. Capturing Your Photos + Videos
Think about all the different places you snap photos. Your phone and spouse’s phone is likely one of the most popular ways you document so many family moments.
You need to create a system that is easy to use and seamless in the sense that it doesn’t create extra work for you. Consider linking a cloud backup program to your phone, and spouses too if they take a lot of photos of the kids.
Dropbox has always worked great for me. With the app on my phone, all of my photos are backed up seamlessly with my husbands. I don’t feel stressed anymore asking him to send me any good photos he got of the kids.
Dropbox is synced on both my phone and my computer so that I have a copy of the files easily accessible from my desktop. The beauty of the cloud services is the back up security but more on that to come!
Some popular cloud services are Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Google Photos or Amazon’s Prime Photos. There are many services out there to back up your photos. You just need to pick one and use it.
If you are capturing photos in other places such as on a camera, be disciplined with moving those photos off your device and into your filing system. UP NEXT
2. Organizing Your Photos + Videos
Create a filing system that will work for you and will be simple to use. I want to share with you the easiest and simplest way I’ve found to organize my files.
I keep my photos and videos catalogued by month and by year.
In my photos folder, I have 1 folder for every year. In each yearly folder, I keep one folder for every month. In each monthly folder, I have a folder for photos and videos. In each of those folders, I have the raw files and any then I keep an edited folder.
Here is an example of what my file folders look like:
2020 __ 01_2020_January__ 02_2020_Febrary______ Photos (Raw + Edited)______ Video (Raw + Edited)__ 03_2020_March …
I used to try and keep folders of every event but with kids, every day is a great photo opportunity. I found it too tedious and detailed to keep individual folders this way. Keeping it simple with years and months is much more simple and sustainable for the long term.
3. Protecting Your Photos + Videos
Last but not least, you need to find a way to protect your memories by backing them up. Digital catastrophes happen all the time. Phones die, hard drives crash and this all usually happens without advanced warning.
If you are keeping a copy of your most cherished memories on your computer, you need to have a seamless way to back them up. This is where Dropbox is so helpful to me. Not only are the files collected from my phone and then synced with my hard dive folder, they are also backed up on in the cloud.
This system works for me because it is seamless, automated and very simple.
I encourage you however to also keep one more copy of your cherished files offline. External hard drives are an inexpensive way to keep a copy of your files in a safe secondary place.
I back up each month on my external hard drive once a month.
This isn’t the most glamorous post but the importance of not only organizing your files, but backing them up securely is important. It’s easy to fall behind here but so much easier to upkeep rather than start over.
The future you will thank yourself!
Life moves too fast. Although we can’t slow it down, we can record the moments that fill our hearts and tell our story through photos and films. I am a Pittsburgh family photographer and film maker that helps families record their stories and pause some of life’s greatest moments.
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