How do I start organizing my photos? Month 1

For many people, just finding all of the photos we've taken in our lifetime can be a huge task. They are in boxes and albums, closets and basements, old drives and digital memory cards. So where do you even start organizing your photos?

My suggestion is to start with the photos on your phone. Digital photos are generally considered the most vulnerable images we have and should be dealt with first. Why are they more vulnerable than the printed photos from our grandparent’s collection? Because digital photos can get lost to something as simple as a phone upgrade. If not backed up properly, photos taken with our phones will cycle in and out of our lives in a few short years. Grandma’s album needs to be preserved too, but we’ll get to that later.

If you are just looking for a way to organize and back up the photos that are on your phone and stop there, something like iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox or OneDrive is what most people will use. By simply turning on the back up and sync settings of these apps that are easily installed on your phone, you are giving yourself some level of insurance for your photos.

Paying for extra storage with these services is highly recommended. Google Drive gives you 15GB of free storage. It takes approximately 1GB of space to store 600 standard images. So if you are planning to back up the thousands of photos on your phone, you need to make sure you have space for them. iCloud, Dropbox and OneDrive are other popular storage solutions that offer. some storage for free with the option to pay for more space.

Backing up the photos from 2022 and starting the new year with a plan for saving your photos is a resolution that I would love to help you make happen. Getting started with the backup tools that are already available on your phone is a matter of personal preference and your comfort level with technology. If you don’t already back up your photos and have questions on how to get started, please reach out to me!

Follow for my next post on what to do after implementing a phone back up.

What is a Photo Manager?

As a long time photo teacher and photographer, I am never surprised by new ideas in the world of photography. I grew up with 110 and disc cameras, graduated to 35mm in my preteen years and got my first lessons in darkroom printing in college. Right about that time, Adobe introduced Photoshop. We didn't care much about Photoshop in 1997 and thought that digital art would never compare to "real art". 25 years later, the reverse is true. Digital photography has become the standard and the norm. Film is a luxury and a niche area, but I'm happy to say it is making a comeback because my students are hooked on the magic of the darkroom!

35mm darkroom print of Buckeye School taken in 1997 for college Photography 101.

But cell phone cameras rule. Fewer people own cameras that aren't built into a phone, yet more people are taking photos than ever before. The average person takes approximately 175 photos a month which means roughly 2000 photos per year. And when it comes to a lifetime of photos, we are now looking at upwards of 100,000 photos that document a lifetime of milestones and memories. What do we do with these images? How do we make sure that a few of these thousands of photos make it out of the cloud and on to the next generation? This is where a photo manager takes the lead.

To date, I have taken 3920 photos on my iPhone in 2022

Over the next few weeks I will be introducing the concept of a photo manager to many of you for the first time. Curating, organizing and preserving digital and print photographs is a growing concern for anyone who takes pictures. Photo managers take the worry and the overwhelm out of their customer's hands.

Follow me as I work to preserve my family photos, dig deeper into the business of photo management and expand on my love of photography.