January 02, 2019

Managing Your Photos

Everyone takes a lot of photos these days and usually with multiple devices (phones, tablets, cameras etc). It can be challenging to manage without a good plan to follow consistently. Below is the process I have used for many years and it works well for me. I make it a priority to work on photos from the previous month at the beginning of each new month. So on January 1st, I stored December's photos.

The first step is to get all of your photos onto your computer for long term storage and remove them from your device.

If your devices have a removable storage card then you can easily copy the photos from the storage card to your computer using a usb sd card adapter. The photos are usually located in the DCIM folder on android devices.

If your devices do not have a removable storage card then you will need to upload your photos to a cloud storage service such as google drive or dropbox. You will want to make sure you do this over a wi-fi connection so you are not using your wireless data plan allotment.

The easiest and best location to store your photos is in the pictures folder (Windows 10). Inside that folder I recommend making a folder for each year and within each year make a folder for each month.

Copy all of the photos you took in the previous month to the correct folder. So if you are storing December 2018 photos then it would be stored in the path of \Pictures\2018\December.

Once you have all of your photos for the month stored onto your computer, I recommend making a backup copy to a USB flash drive. These can be purchased for under $25. Then at the end of the year, I recommend taking the entire year of photos and burning them onto CD or DVD for longer term storage.

I have found this process takes less than 30 minutes per month and helps keep your photos organized and safe. I hope this helps someone, let me know in the comments below if you have other tips or tricks.

Always Thinking Here at Doe Valley

No comments: