My Guide to Organizing Pictures Without Losing Your Mind: Part One: Introduction

I’m the youngest of four and while I’m probably my mom’s favorite now, (right, mom?) I was a complete unwanted surprise at the time. 

What does this mean?

I have very few pictures of myself as a baby and kid. My baby book literally has my date of birth and my birth weight. Nothing else. 

So, naturally, I’m a little photo obsessed.  I know it’s pretty common for moms to do so with their first kid but my obsession hasn’t gone away and I don’t really see it happening anytime in the near future, especially not for my youngest. If anything, it’s gotten worse.

Naturally, as a photo obsessed mom, I’m always looking for ways to organize my pictures and put them in places where they will actually get looked at rather than my computer or phone.

I don’t think there is one way to do this and many people may have simpler version than I do but we are creatures of habit, no doubt. And this works for me.

In order to keep my sanity, I have a 5 step system which helps me keep everything in order while still getting all I want to do, done on a schedule. It looks something like this…

1. Uploading
2. Organizing
3. Backups
4. Photo Books
5. Family Video

Each step in my system involves other mini steps which I’ll go into further details in future posts but for now, I’ll leave you with a quick explanation of what I do.

UPLOADING

I use two systems to upload my photos. Most people, I would guess, are content with having one way to upload their photos but I’m super anxious about losing anything.

It’s happened before. It’s not pretty.

So I upload the photos to Google Photos and Dropbox.

ORGANIZING

Once my photos are uploaded, I organize. Dropbox is my first choice because it actually uploads to the cloud and then saves the files on my computer because I have everything linked.

It saves them to my computer by date and time so I never get confused when they were taken. I delete the ones I don’t like and leave them in a folder by month and year.

For google photos everything is uploaded to my account and then I organize from there with a fun little secret I have.

BACKUPS

I have so many backup systems, it’s actually kind of scary.

I have my little secret weapon- Google Photos- a flashdrive, cds (old school) and my computer itself.

FAMILY PHOTO BOOKS

Since I was a kid I’ve been obsessed with scrapbooking but adult life plus kids is not conducive to that kind of commitment. Enter online photo books. Possibly the best invention ever made for busy moms.

I make a photo book every year. I haven’t printed all of them yet, it does get expensive when you have 100 pages per year but the ones I haven’t are in my project section finished just waiting to be added to the cart.

END OF THE YEAR VIDEO

This is probably my favorite part of the entire process. The very last part of what I do with my photos. I make a slideshow with both my favorite video clips and photographs of the year set to three or four favorite songs.