I’m a mom, and that means I have SO many photos of my daughter on my phone and on my computer! I wanted to share today how I organize our personal photos that causes no stress or confusion! My favorite part of the year is when I get to go back through all of my images and pick out my favorite ones for the scrapbook! 🙂
Like this photo. How stinkin’ cute is she?! She does this stuff ALL ON HER OWN, and I just can’t get enough.
Anyway, back to organizing. On our hard drive, we have a drive that’s titled “Our Pictures.” Within that drive, we organize by folders. We have folders for:
- Lily’s Monthly Photos with 12 folders within it, one for each month.
- A Day In the Life – within this folder there are individual folders for each month we do them.
- A folder for each year – within each year, we have a folder for each month! I number the monthly folders (01, 02, 03) with the name of the month after it because then it’s automatically in chronological order, which I like.
- Steven’s photos – he does his own projects sometimes and these go in his own folder because that’s what he prefers!
- Headshots
- Scrapbook photos – at the end of each year, I make a folder for that year and put my preferred photos in there so it’s super easy to order them when it’s time. However, my goal for next year is to start picking them out and ordering them monthly so it’s not so overwhelming at the end of the year in terms of cost, haha.
- Print order for grandparents – I try to send monthly photos of Lily to the grandparents, and they love it 🙂 Having a folder for each time I order makes it really easy to order them!
Since I am a photographer, I do shoot in raw, and then edit the photos I want to keep. So within each monthly folder, there’s a RAW folder and a JPEG folder.
That’s it! It’s a pretty simple system and once you start to set it up, it’s super easy to stick with! Whenever I import photos onto my computer I import directly into the monthly folder it belongs in!
Now, what about all those photos on my phone?! I have them set to back up automatically to google photos, and when it comes time to order photos for the scrapbook, I pop into my google photos folder online, and pull out the photos I want and add them to my scrapbook folder! You can also use an app (like Chatbooks) where you can create awesome little books of photos from your phone or Instagram (you can even have them automatically created)!
Easy peasy 🙂 Printing photos is SO important to me, and having this system in place for organizing them makes it incredibly easy for me to actually follow through with printing them!
If you aren’t into making scrapbooks, Artifact Uprising has beautiful options for photo books! I plan to use them for all of Lily’s “A Day In the Life” sessions, and I can’t wait 🙂
Do you have any other tips that work well for organizing your photos? Share them in the comments if you do!
Linda is a Maine-based photographer specializing in weddings and creating family legacies. You can see more of her work online at lindabarryphotography.com, on Instagram, or on Facebook. If you want to reach out directly: linda@lindabarryphotography.com. To sign up for the monthly newsletter full of encouragement and real life, click here!
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