Storing digital photos can be a real pain in the tuchus, am I right? Smart phones have no doubtidly given us the ability to take a picture of absolutely everything we do. Or even more importantly, everything our adorbale little squishies do! I've often wondered what my kids think about having their entire childhood recorded. Like, EVERY SINGLE THING recorded, lol. I know I still enjoy looking back on the pictures and videos my family took of me growing up so hopefully my kids appreciate my efforts some day. I digress. So how do we make sure these pictures and videos stay safe? I've been asked this question a lot over the years. First, staying organized is extremely important. You should create a system that works for you and stick with it. I myself organize photos and videos by date. I have a folder with the year, inside that a folder for each month numerically, inside each month are folders from which numeric day I took the pictures, inside those folders is a folder of the type of event, and finally inside that folder are the pictures. So it looks something like this... 2023(year) - 03(Month March) - 28(day of March) - Solo's Birthday(type of event) - pictures are here. When you organize numerically the folders stay in order. If you use folders with words then they won't be organized in order when you open the folder. Becuase I've been organizing this way for so long it's easy to remember where to find an old picture. Where is that picture I took of the kids and the dogs walking on that log like a hundred times? Well it was about 5 years ago, deffenitly in the summer during one of our camping trips. Bam! 2018 - June - 21st - Tent Camping!
Next, we need a good consistant system to keep these pictures safe. There are of course lots of online options these days which I absolutely use. We are an apple family so storing things in the cloud has made things very easy. However, that's not where I stop. I highly reccommend using an external hard drive. They are fairly inexpensive and small in size. I personally use Seagate. It's basically a drag and drop method and It looks the same on the hard drive as it does on my computer. Year - Month - Day - Type of Event - Pictures. Next, you have a second hard drive with the exact same thing. That's right folks, I back up my back up. I keep one hard drive at home and then one in a safe place outside of my home. You can ask a close friend, family member, or even get a small safety deposit box. That's right, I take my pictures VERY seriously! I do all this in January every year so I don't get overwhelmed with multiple years. That's it! Using this method has made the thousands and thousands of pictures i've taken easy to access and without being frustrated or crying. lol.
If you are someone who could use some one on one help with getting organized please let me know!