04 Jan Organizing Photos from the Previous Year
Organizing photos from 2022 would get 2023 to a great start! A new year is a great time to close out the previous year. It’s time to organize the 2022 photos.
Here is the best way to do that.
Collect all photos
The first step is to collect all the photos from the various sources. These sources include pictures that you took with your phone, Facebook, WhatsApp, SD cards, and photos that you saved from texts. Don’t forget to include online sources such as iCloud or Amazon Photos.
The best place to collect all these images is either a dedicated folder on your computer or a dedicated External Hard Drive.
Curate the Photos
Once all the images are in one place, you need to go through them and curate the photos.
Curating the photos takes some time, but it’s time very well spent. The point of this process is to eliminate or at least reduce the clutter, and keep the best, most meaningful pictures.
The pictures that are easy to delete include photos of items you considered purchasing, blurry pictures, screenshots of your phone. The photos which are harder to delete are the near-duplicates.
Ask yourself – would you be interested in looking at these photos again? If the answer is NO, the pictures need to be deleted. If the answer is YES, because it’s just too cute, then keep it.
If you want to be ruthless in culling your photos, you could ask – would my children or grandchildren be interested in these photos? Again, if the answer is NO, the photo should be deleted.
On the other hand, if the photo or series of photos tell a story, keep the photos. If the photo tugs at your heart-stings, keep it.
Organize the Photos
After curating your photos, you want to organize them.
There is no one right way to organize photos. The organization needs to make sense to you, so you could easily find the photo you’re looking for when the time comes.
Some ideas include organizing chronologically by year and month, or by person, or by event or by location. This is how I organized my own photos in 2021:
You can see that we went to Asheville in March, 2021, and I created a separate folder for those pictures to distinguish them from “regular” pictures in March.
I have to admit, that I have not yet organized my 2022 photos, but we traveled quite a bit more, so there will be more folders!
Backing Up Your Photos
Last, but definitely not least, is backing up your work.
I’m an advocate of redundant backups. You should have a copy of your photos on-premises and another copy on-line. That way, if your External Hard Drive crashes, you have the on-line service as a back-up. Alternatively, if your WiFi goes down, you have your photos on your hard drive.
If you need help with any part of this process, please contact me at amira@PreciousMemsPhoto.com.
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