How To Organize Your Photos On Your Computer 2021

HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR COMPUTER In 5 Easy Steps

Angela Goodhart

How To Organize Your Digital Photos in 5 Easy Steps

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Goodhart Photography 2021 www.goodhartphotographyva.com

Table Of Contents

Get On Top of the Digital Chaos! 2

How to Organize Your Digital Photos. 3

1. Create a Folder Structure on Your Main Computer 4

2. Organize Old Digital Photos 5

3. Organize Your Physical Photos and/or Negatives. 9

4 . Back Up Your Digital Photos 10

5. Showcase Your Photos! 11

Conclusion 12


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One of the most common questions I hear from my clients is how to organize your

digital photos. This makes perfect sense of course, since many of them have been taking

digital pictures since 2004 – the year digital cameras became more popular than �lm

cameras – or earlier.

Chances are you’ve taken thousands of photographs — possibly tens of thousands of

photographs since then. And yet, chances are also that you aren’t happy with the way

you store and organize your photographs. They are probably spread across several

memory cards, CDs and USBs, Facebook, and computer hard drives. And now you are

desperate to learn how to organize your photographs.

This ebook will walk you through how to organize your digital photos step by step!


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It’s time to get organized! Our photographs contain our precious memories and

observations about our lives. It is essential that we learn to organize and preserve them —

otherwise, why take them if we can’t �nd them when we need them or if they will

disappear when our hard drive crashes?

How much time have you wasted looking for that one perfect photo of Susie tasting ice

cream for the �rst time at age 3 for her high school yearbook? How devastated would

you be if your computer crashed and you did not have a backup of your photographs?

How to Organize Your Digital Photos.So let’s get started with how to organize your digital photos.

Get On Top of the Digital Chaos!

I’ve had two clients over the years ask me for their wedding photographs after their

computer crashed and they lost them. And one of my good friends paid thousands of

dollars to have her family photos rescued from a computer that crashed.

Losing photographs causes so much heartache, and it’s completely avoidable with a little

bit of discipline and e�ort.

A good starting goal is to have all of your images in a single location, organized in a

logical, easy to remember way, and backed up to at least two locations.


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There are �ve main steps to achieving this goal.

, create a folder structure for organizing your digital �les, and from here on out, use

it! All new photographs that you take should be loaded into this folder format. This step

shouldn’t take very long, although it may take a while for this to become habitual.

First

And , you’ll want to showcase and actually use some of the best photographs you

take!

�nally

The step is to gather and organize all of your old digital photos into the �le

structure you created in step 1.

second

These steps are all described in more detail below.

The step is to gather, digitize, and organize all of your old physical photos and

negatives into your �le structure.

third

1. Create a Folder Structure on Your Main Computer

The step is to create a backup system for your computer.fourth

A strong, useful folder structure is the �rst step in how to organize your digital photos.

The structure should be meaningful to you, and more importantly, for future you and

for your descendants.


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Within “Pictures”, create an “ Inbox” folder and a folder for each year you'll be

organizing photographs.

00

The highest level directory of your computer should have a top level folder named

“Pictures”. If you don't have a "Pictures" directory, create one.

The reason I label it with “00” in the front is so that it will sort at the top of my Pictures

folder.

The “ Inbox” is where I put photos to sort, that I’ve downloaded from FB or that

friends have emailed me, etc….

00


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Now that you’ve got the system in place, try to make time every day or at least once a

week to put the photos you’ve taken into the system in the correct folders.

2. Organize Old Digital Photos

I used to keep month folders, but that just added another layer of clicking if I was trying

to �nd a speci�c image from Meadowlark Gardens and I couldn't remember whether I

was there in April, May or June. Why not just have the folder Meadowlark Gardens

nested directly under the “year” folder?

Within each “event/subject” folder, I leave my favorite images visible and I put the other

good images in a “shoebox” folder. I delete any image I don’t like.

Within each year folder, I create a folder for each event or subject. I end the folder name

with the year too, in case there are multiple years where that speci�c subject or event was

photographed.

I also have a “00 Miscellaneous” folder in each year for all of the images that I just have 1

or 2 snaps of that don’t warrant a separate folder.

The next step in how to organize your digital photos is to bring all of your old digital �les,

prints and negatives into your system.


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The �rst part of this is �nding all of your old photos. Here are just a few of the places

your photographs may be hiding:

2a. Find Your Old Digital Photos.

Instagram

Facebook

Other Social Media

Email messages

Your old computers

Your current computer

CD-Rs


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2b. Sort Your Old Digital Photos.

Visit these places one by one, and start downloading and gathering the images into the

“00 Inbox” folder within your “Pictures” folder. Your photos may be in folders already

from previous attempts to organize them. Don’t sort them right now, just keep the

photos in whatever folders they are already in and move them to “00 Inbox”. Do the

same for all of your loose and one-o� images.

It can be a little overwhelming, but just take a deep breath and begin. Baby steps count.

Slow and steady wins the race.

USBs

External hard drives

Cloud Storage

Once you’ve gathered up all of your old digital photos, it’s time to start organizing them.

I can’t say this enough — slow and steady wins the race. Chances are, this task is

enormously daunting to you!

and moving them to the proper folders in your File Folder

Structure.

The best thing to do is to commit to spending 1-2 hours each week or 20 minutes a day

sorting through your images


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One very important principle in how to organize your digital photos is that you must

learn to cull them. It can be tempting to save every photo you take, but I highly

recommend deleting the ones that aren’t very good or that are duplicates of other

images. No one needs 128 photographs of �reworks on the Fourth of July, every Fourth

of July. You aren’t doing your future self or your descendants any favors down the road

by leaving them thousands of repetitive or poor images.

2c. Cull Your Old Digital Photos.

Don’t give yourself a deadline for getting the project done — that's a recipe for failure.

It’s impossible to predict how long this project will take, especially if you start walking

down memory lane every time you look at old images.

I am a sentimental soul, yet I am ruthless about deleting images that are duplicates or that

I just don’t like. I take so many photographs, and there is just no need to keep the bad

images or the identical images. I’m leaving my descendants a ton of photographs as it is,

and keeping the not-so-good ones makes it harder to �nd the good ones.

One caveat here, don’t delete all of the photos of yourself! Don’t decide you’ll start

saving pictures when you lose 20 pounds or when the dermatologist �lls in your wrinkles.

I understand this temptation — I’m not overly fond of the pictures of me gaining 60

pounds with my last pregnancy! But over time, I’ve come to view those images di�erently.

And I would love photographs of my own mother hugely pregnant of me (none exist).

So do it for future you, and for your descendants.


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2d. Rename Your Old Digital Photos

Once you’ve moved images to their subject folder, I recommend renaming the images to

the folder name and year. For example, photos of my family vacation to Maine in 2015

would be renamed “Maine-Vacation-2015-###”.

At the very least, keep a couple of them in “Shoebox” folders. Don’t erase yourself from

your family’s history.

This makes it easier to �nd your images with search functionality. It’s also helpful to your

future self and your descendants to be able to identify an image by its name. Macs and

PCs have batch renaming functions so this should be fairly easy.

3. Organize . Your Physical Photos and/or Negatives


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3a. First, and negatives and put them in a single

location, like a stack of shoeboxes or a banker’s box.

collect all of your physical photos

3b. Next, and toss the ones that aren’t worth saving. sort through them

3c. Third, . There are scanning services you can use such as

or , but they are expensive.

digitize your good photos

Costco Fotobridge

For negatives, you can use this , which is on

my wishlist. It has a large screen for looking at the images and is supposed to be fast. Plus

it is high rated.

KODAK Slide N Scan for $159 on Amazon

Once you have a handle on all of your old digital �les, turn your attention to digitizing

your prints and/or negatives.

Be ruthless when you cull them!! It will save you the time of digitizing them and

organizing them on your computer.

If you can't bear to throw them out, at least toss them into a bankers box labeled "Photos

Rejected For Digitizing".

You can scan them yourself using the highly rated

, or the free , which is what I use.

Plustek Photo Scanner for $199 on

Amazon PhotoScan by Google Mobile app

https://www.costcodvd.com/services-and-pricing/photograph-transfer

https://www.fotobridge.com/print-pricing/

https://amzn.to/35nPrzu

https://amzn.to/2LCicB8

https://www.google.com/photos/scan/


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I recommend at least two back up locations with one of them being cloud-based. I

personally use two external hard drives and one cloud based backup system.

The fourth step in how to organize your digital photos is creating a back-up system. This

is so incredibly important — computers eventually die and hard drives eventually fail so if

you aren’t backing up your photographs you are guaranteed to lose them at some point.

4 . Back Up Your Digital Photos

3d. Finally, on your

computer!

move your newly digitized pictures into your File Folder System


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I used to use , but now I use . There are many other options available,

such as iCloud, Google Photos, and Amazon’s Prime Photos.

Backblaze Dropbox

If you are not setting up your computer to automatically back up your photos, you’ll have

to do it manually at least once a week.

5. Showcase Your Photos!Now that you’ve learned how to organize your digital photos and begun the process, it’s

time to celebrate and showcase some of your favorites! Don’t keep them hiding on your

hard drive.

Cloud storage is also important, as it provides another layer of protection against the

failure of hard drives. It’s also convenient, since you can usually access your photos from

anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection.

For my hard drives, I use this since I am also storing my

professional archives there as well and I need a lot of space. Every two years I replace the

oldest one, since hard drives typically last 3-5 years.

8 TB Seagate Drive from Amazon

There are so many wonderful options for showcasing your photographs. At the very

least, why not create an annual yearbook for your family? You could even consider it

another form of backup!

https://www.backblaze.com/

https://www.dropbox.com/

https://amzn.to/3bnLjmC


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Beyond photo books, there are hundreds of options for printing your photos on tangible

items.

is a very popular option for photo albums. I haven’t used them yet as I haven’t

quite forgiven them for buying out MyPublisher.com and then shutting it down.

MyPublisher was one of the original album makers and I used them for all of my

photobooks before I started my photography business.

Shutter�y

You can create Christmas ornaments, annual calendars, or greeting cards.

You can create a photo quilt, a photo bag, a photo mug.

You can print out a hundred 4×6 prints and store them in a custom photo box.

https://www.shutterfly.com/


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Questions, comments or tips of your own to share? I’d love to hear from you!

Organizing photographs can seem very overwhelming, but the best time to get started is

now. By taking the time to read this blog post, you have gained knowledge about how to

organize your digital photos. The next step is to act!

I understand it can be pretty overwhelming to think about organizing your photos if

you’ve spent years just taking them and storing them in the cloud or on your computer

by date or in dozens of other locations. But this is a project that is not going to get easier

as time goes by!

So you might as well get started! There is no time like the present. Your future self will

thank you.

And if a photograph really makes you smile, print it out large, frame it, and hang it on

your wall! Or better yet, order a canvas gallery wrap that comes ready to hang!

Keeping photographs of things and people you love visible in your home is an easy way to

lift your spirits and remind you of the things in your life that you are grateful for.

Conclusion

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How To Organize Your Photos On Your Computer 2021