Photo Organizing - Part 1 Prune & Centralize Quarterly


Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today's video is the first of a four part series where I share my tools and processes for organizing and accessing digital photos.  In this first video, I'll cover an overview plus Step 1 - Prune and Centralize Photos Quarterly. 
Okay -- trying to figure out how to organize your photos is not a new problem, but with the massive numbers of digital photographs that we all have now, it can be a pretty daunting one.  I am not particularly creative or artsy when it comes to photographs.  You won't catch me scrapbooking and I don't take hundreds of photos for every occasion.  But I do want my pictures to be organized, I don't want them taking up a ton of space on my phone, and I want to be able to access them anywhere when I need them.  Most importantly, I don't want to spend a ton of time futzing with a super complicated system.  
A couple of notes:
  • PC - I'm a PC user.  I've been told that all of this is easier if you use all Mac products, but that is not my situation for a whole variety of reasons.  So, I use a PC, an iPhone and an iPad.  And my solution is tailored to fit that hardware scenario.  
  • Quarterly - I am someone who likes projects, but I don't love maintenance.  For example, I love prepping my garden, planning it out, and putting in all of the brand new plants.  What I do NOT love is weeding, watering, and basically being a good gardener throughout the growing season.  Because I know this about myself, I trick my brain into maintaining my photo system by only dealing with it quarterly.  I would much rather spend 2 hours every 3 months than a couple of minutes every day or 30 minutes every week.  Even if you are different than I, this system can still work for you.
So, I go about my life much life everyone else, taking pictures, receiving them from others and generally having digital photos in a whole bunch of disparate places.  But once every three months, I attempt to tame the beast.  Here's the process in a nutshell:
  • Step 1 - Prune and Centralize Quarterly
  • Step 2 - Organize Simply
  • Step 3 - Manage and Group with Picasa
  • Step 4 - Share and Access Anywhere with Google Photos
Each of the four videos in this series deals with one of these steps. I'll go through the first step in this video. First, 

Prune Photos

The first thing I do for my Quarterly Photo Chores is to get rid of all of the photos I don't want to keep long-term.  Just like all of you, I take multiple pictures to make sure I get one good shot.  I don't want all of those iterations -- I just want the best one.  I get rid of multiple iterations and other random stuff like screen shots and terrible pictures or videos my kids have taken with my phone.  

Store Photos Centrally

The next step is to bring all of those photos to one central place.  You have to have a mothership or a central storage place.  For this, I use my PC.  I know this seems archaic and I have attempted to change this to centralize cloud storage, but for a bunch of reasons -- mostly lack of cloud functionality and syncing reliability problems -- I keep coming back to having my PC be the photo mothership.  So, how do you get your photos into the mothership?  Let's walk through the different ways:
  • Camera - I've completely gone away from using a stand-alone camera, but back when I did, I used the Eye-fi memory card product to wirelessly transmit photos from my camera to my computer over wifi.  It was not without problems, so once the camera became good enough on my phone, I happily said good-bye to this solution.  You can also use a USB cord or a memory card reader to make this happen. 
  • Shared photos mobile - Photos are so easy to share and trade now.  Many of the great pictures I get are from other folks who are, frankly, much better at taking pictures.  They might come from one of the parents on your kid's sports team who posted to a Shutterfly account, or from someone else on your vacation who put all of their photos on a photo sharing site like Google Photos or Snapfish.  Or it could be from an photo sharing app like Moments or Cluster.  Suffice it to say, we are all sharing photos and there is a proliferation of apps and websites that make it easy to do this.  In these situations, I determine the photos I want to keep long-term and save them to my camera roll.  There is almost always an easy way to do this from every app.  Push the universal sharing button and then choose to Save to Camera Roll.  I make a point to do this as I'm looking at the pictures (Hey, there's a good one of my son.  Or I like this picture of the team).  That way, when I'm doing my quarterly chores, the photos are already on the camera roll of my iPhone or iPad and will move to my PC with the rest of the pictures that I've taken. 
  • iPhone/iPad - I turn on Photo Stream so that I can see my photos on all of my iOS devices, but how do you get them onto the computer?  This is a huge pain in the butt.  Apple makes a piece of software that is part of the iCloud for PC suite called iCloud Photos.  Theoretically, you should be able to see all of your Photo Stream photos in this software and then you can pull them onto your PC.  Well, I haven't had great success with this.  The syncing is strange so that I'm missing a photo here and there and I greatly dislike having to go through all of my photos one by one to figure out if any are missing.  So, I use a USB cord and a piece of software called iFunbox to get access to the storage area of my iPhone and iPad and pull the photos in.  I'll do a whole separate video on this process since it's too much to explain here.
  • Shared photos PC - This is the easiest.  I download the photos directly onto my PC.
Okay -- so now that I can bring everything into the mothership, how do I organize it in a simple way? Watch the second video in this series to find out!  I really appreciate any comments you leave below and thanks for watching!

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