52: Digital Photo Organization: Why it's a Challenge Plus Some Tips
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Welcome to episode 52 of Permission to be Messy. I'm your host, JoAnn Krall and today I'm talking all about digital photo organization. This is always a hot topic. I usually, if, when I look back at my memories, I see that I talk about this a lot in February. Cause I think February is a great time to get your photos organized, but I reached out to my community and ask them once again, what they struggle most with organizing digital photos.
And this is some of the things that they said,Having tech that's no longer accessible. Finding a place for everything. Too many copies in too many places. Worries about losing the metadata, all the information that comes along with the photo. How to name and categorize them. Platforms changing, which is like the tech that's no longer accessible. So many things to organize.
Again, too many photos. Believing I can do it on my own. I'm going to talk about this one first before when I finished this list. Not getting too deep with the organizing. So really creating those detailed systems that are just really too hard to maintain.
Screenshots. Weeding those out of all the actual photos that you take. Ah coming to the final systems. Feeling like this infinite space and just filling it.and then not knowing what's on old hard drives and, just that overall sense of where is everything.
Now, before I get into my process and how I do things. I do want to address that. Believing I can't do it on my own because somebody else said wanting someone else to do it for them. When it comes to photos, they're an extension of yourself. They're an extension of what you've seen in the world.
So nobody can make those decisions for you. Unless you want them to, but really, if you don't want to lose, what's important to you. It's important to go through this process yourself, but also it will help you going forward because it'll help you be more mindful because this is the first thing I want you to do. Every time you grab your phone to take a photo, be really mindful, is this something that you're going to save? Is this something that's, worthy of capturing?
I mean, you know, if you're a dog, mom, a cat mom, or you're just a mom in general. We are the people that typically have the most photos on our camera's and everywhere, because, we want to capture every single moment. And not saying other people don't as well. it's taking photos is about making memories and that's for personal and for business there are other reasons. So the first thing I'm going to tell you, and I tell you this about everything. I believe that you need to simplify. You've got to simplify, and I know this is a scary thing for some people with photos. and I'm not saying you have to reduce your photos if you want. a hundred thousand photos. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But if you're the person that's here, because you feel like you have too many photos and they're not really all valuable to you, then this would be key for you to simplify by again. Thinking about what you're screenshotting, thinking about the photos that you're taking, what are you filling up your space with?
Is it stuff, just think of it almost If you were filling up your home with physical stuff, how does that feel? Because it's a lot easier to fill things up digitally but that doesn't mean it doesn't cause us the same amount of stress. So I always say, start with an inventory. That's my collect phase. When I talk about digital and paper, I do the same thing with photos. And when I say collect, it's really about taking inventory and this isn't a detailed inventory.
This is just you looking and saying. Where are all my photos? Do I have hard drives? Do I have thumb drives? Do I have CDs? Do I have them on my computer? Where are they on my computer? Are they on a cloud services? What cloud services, and then get an idea. You know, a lot of these duplicates are they full backups because I think this is where people get tripped up.
They're like, well, I can't delete anywhere because I don't know if this is backed up somewhere else. So getting control of it before you create that backup of, and I'm saying backup of your most precious moments. Or if it's for business stuff, the stuff that you use all the time. You really want to be mindful of getting that all organized before you start creating those backups. So when you're going through and you're deleting photos.
That phrase right there. It gives a lot of people, anxiety. I want you to think about each photo. Do you love it? Or do you need it? It's the question I ask about everything and I think it applies to photos as well. Now you're going to the, when you're doing your initial purge. you're going to be keeping a lot of photos and that's fine.
When you get to the point where you start grouping things, that's when you can take a second look, and this is where I'll give an example. You're at a birthday party, you take 50 photos. A good portion of those photos. They're not necessarily exact duplicates, but they're of the same people. You know, you might take like seven of the group of people. You don't need to keep all seven. and this is where. Because it's digital. It feels easier to keep them because it's not taking up physical space, but eventually down the road, It's going to make it really difficult for you to enjoy them and for other people to enjoy them.
Especially because I believe that when you take photos, you want to document what the photo's over about. So if you have a lot of them, that is. It's really difficult to do.
And speaking of grouping. People want to create these elaborate systems with our photos when they're dealing with a bunch of them. And many of them are actually clutter. You want to start with those broad categories. If you're a business owner, it's going to be personal and business. Within your personal, it could just be decades, years or something simple, not super detailed. That will really help, but it's also how your brain works.
If you think of your life as events, then organize them by event, different holidays, birthdays, things like that. And when we do get to those systems, it would be a disservice for me to tell you how to organize them. I'm not going to tell everybody the best way to organize your things is by family member. If somebody really says to me, I absolutely don't know how to organize. I always say go by year. Because, it's really about what your ultimate goal is. Are you saving these memories for you to enjoy? Are you saving them for your family to enjoy in the future?
I think that categorizing them you know, in a, in a really like high level of, making sure that every person's tagged or, cause there are softwares out there that can do all this tagging. In fact, I tell the story often I used to use the Creative Memories™️ software and it was awesome.
I could tag each daughter. I could tag the year I could tag the event. So anything I was searching for, I could find it and there are things out there that will do this. but what happened to me is Creative Memories™️ stopped supporting that software, which was okay for a while because the PC that I had it on, it was still working.
But when that PC died and I needed to go put it on another computer, it didn't work because there was no upgrades. and it wasn't supported. So I didn't lose my photos, but I lost all of the organization. So if you are going to go that route with some sort of software, make sure they have a good history.
And that it's something that if you are spending the time to do those tagging, that if you lost. it wouldn't be the end of the world. Not saying losing the photos, but losing all the, all of the actual organization. So just think about that when you're looking for a system to use, to organize your photos personally, me, because that happened to me, I've always stuck with file folders just like I would for documents.
I've actually been going through the process of categorizing my stuff. Now I have a bunch of folders labeled with what the events are and what's in them. and some of them are by like, I'll have one folder for one daughter, one for another, which is really just stuff that's specific to them. and that's how I have it right now.
And if I never organized it, further, it would be fine. They would be able to figure out what's going on. I'd like to get it a little bit more broad, however, to be honest, I think the most important thing for me is to preserve those memories. So when I create a folder, I create the, here's where it was, this is the year, this is who was in it. I create that information in the in the folder name.
And then I try to at least name one picture in that folder. With some sort of additional information about the photos, because when we have physical photos, we can actually take a photo safe pencil and write on the back of the photos. I always say, who, what, where, when and how were you feeling at that time?
It gives like such a great story behind the photo. That's a little bit more difficult to do with digital, depending on how you're organizing and what you're using to organize them.
I do have a mini course on photo organization, which covers physical and digital photos.
I couldn't go into that, every detail here, but one thing I do, I want to leave you a couple tips. When you are deleting and I'm using air quotes here, when you're deleting photos, instead of using the recycle bin on your computer, create a folder with today's date or the, yeah whatever the date is, you're starting create a folder and label it. Something like, photos to be deleted. That way. You're going to put them anything that you're saying, oh, I'm going to get rid of that. You're just going to move them into that. Instead of hitting that delete button, you're just going to move them into that folder because when you get to the end of everything.
So when you've gone through your computer, when you've gone through your hard drives, when you've gone through your cloud services. If you think to yourself, oh my gosh, I got rid of that photo or I don't have any photos related to this you could find them in that folder. And then when you're done with everything hit the big delete button.
It's going to be scary. And I'm actually, ah, this isn't related to photos, but it kind of is because there's screenshots in there. I'm gonna talk about screenshots in a second as well.
So I have a folder on my desktop and it's labeled to read. And it is filled with PDFs and, checklists and screenshots, and there's 857 items in there. And I'm going to do something crazy. I'm going to scan it to make sure there's nothing important in there.
Just in case I move something in there by mistake, but I'm not going to open any of the files. I'm just going to look at what they are and make sure that they are like infographics or screenshots or, screenshots that I don't need to save. maybe I was watching a webinar and I took a screenshot. I'm actually going to go live and I'm going to delete that live with you, and I'm going to show you, I'm going to take it right out of my recycle bin. It's going to be scary, but I'm going to do it because. This folder, even though it's at the top of my desktop, out of sight out of mind, doesn't take up a lot of space.
It doesn't even take up a lot of space on my hard drive.There's a lot of open loops in there and I don't need any of that information. I haven't looked at it. And I know I'm just going to let it go. It's going to be very freeing. So I digress. My next tip. Screenshots remember back when I said somebody was saying, how do you weed through those?
I think it's important to keep up with that.Screenshots are a big reason why I don't auto backup my photos from my phone. Now my daughter she, she has an iPhone, but she has it synced to Google photos. She doesn't take screenshots of personal things, so it's okay for her to do that. I sometimes do so for me, just for my own peace of mind, to make sure that nothing's getting pushed up into Google that shouldn't, if it's not protected fully, even though I, you have everything locked down and yeah. I have everything. I don't put anything, private out on front of Google. Anything that is sensitive information. I don't put anything sensitive onto the cloud. That's just personal preference. I keep it all on my own devices.
So, whether you're taking screenshots for personal stuff, or you're taking screenshots for business stuff. Those of us that are business owners probably have more screenshots than the average person, but we all do it. I mentioned that to read folder. I have a system for new information coming in.
If you've heard me talk about this, but I have to do, to pay, to file, and to read. To do is going to be anything that I need to take action on that isn't a bill because then I have to pay. And then to read is all of those infographics, PDF downloads, articles, and then, screenshots from webinars or things like that.And then to file is anything that I need to keep for reference.
So I do move my files in there and you can do this with your screenshots. You can do this type of a system use we'll use what names resonate with you. It could just be, to save or to read or whatever categories make sense to you. You can do this, just do this with your screenshots so that you don't have to necessarily make decisions right away. that you'll have a place where they're all organized and processed and if you keep up with it, it can be really helpful. one thing I, a lot of people do they import, or they sync their phone to their computer again, it's like automatic and, they just leave stuff out there and it's just a jumbled mess.
So make sure you process those screenshots. That's really what I'm trying to say.
Back to that list of people struggling it's really about too many files and the fact that there's so many options of ways to organize things. And because they're digital files, it's hard to envision what's where, and how many duplicates there are. You can definitely reduce photos that are blurry, that make no sense. how many times do you screenshot something and it's like your pocket? By mistake or whatever you're doing. And if you took some scenic photos and they really don't make any sense anymore, and you're not going to use them, there are photos that are a lot easier to delete. The difficulty comes in when I talk about things like those events, where you have, 50 photos from a birthday party, it's hard to delete some.
But if your goal is to get to the point where you have less. Then definitely you want to be more strict with yourself when doing that. So I hope this helped again. I do have that mini photo course. I'm going to put the information in the show notes and as always, you can ask me questions.
You can send me an email, my contact information in there. And, if you want to schedule a free a strategy call you can do that as well.
And as always, I'm wishing you much progress, peace, purpose, and the permission to be messy. Thanks for listening.
