The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll tell you why I use Google Photos as my main photo system. A couple of years ago, I did a 4-part series on how I organized and managed my digital photos -- using a combination of Picasa and Google Photos.  I've since abandoned that system -- mostly because my computer crashed and lost all of my hard storage data, but since I already had all of my photos stored in Google Photo's cloud, I just started using that full-time.   I've done some videos since then on how to free up space on your phone and how I use Google Photos, but I thought I'd restate my reasons for WHY I use Google Photos in the first place.  The first reason is to Free Up Space on My Phone I don't want every photo that I've ever taken stored on my phone.  I don't have unlimited data and I don't want to have to choose between deleting old photos or taking new ones.  Google Photos...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I transfer my photos from my iPhone to my computer using iFunbox. This is part of a series of videos on organizing and accessing digital photos. I love many things about the iPhone and iPad, but one thing that makes me a little crazy is that in Apple's quest for ease and simplification, they have taken away a lot of the control that you have as a user.  One particular pet peeve of mine is that you don't have direct access to the file structure of your iPhone.   The reason I originally discovered the free iFunBox program is that I had a bunch of phantom photos on my iPhone. In other words, my phone said that I had 3GB of photos even after I had cleaned off the phone and only had about 10 photos showing in my Camera Roll.  I downloaded iFunBox on my PC and hooked up my phone to get access to my iPhone's full file structure and was able to find and delete al...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and this is the 4th video in a series about the processes and tools I use to organize my photos.  In the previous videos, we've covered storing centrally, simple physical organization and using Picasa to manage and group photos.  In this video, I'll discuss using Google Photos to access my photos anywhere and share them with friends and family. Access Anywhere I realized early on that I wasn't going to be able to store all of my photos on my iPhone.  I don't have unlimited storage after all, who does? -- and I don't like having to delete a bunch of photos so that I can make room for more.  Having central storage on my PC solved that issue (see Parts 1 & 2 of this video series for more on that).  Every time I do my quarterly photo chores, I transfer all of my photos to my PC and clean off my phone so that it is empty.  Great!  The problem was -- I still wanted to be able t...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and this is the third video in a 4 part series about organizing and accessing your digital photos. In the first 2 videos, I covered storing my photos centrally and physically organizing them simply.  In this video, I'll talk about how I manage and virtually group my photos using Picasa.  I've been using Picasa for photo management for years now. To give a brief history, Google acquired this desktop software in 2004 and then started phasing it out in favor of Google Photos.  By early 2016 Google had completely stopped providing support for it and its online component -- Picasaweb. So, why do I still use it?  Simple -- even though Google stopped updating this software, they haven't built all of its features into Google Photos yet -- so I will continue using Picasa until they do. I also use Google Photos, but more about that in a later video.  What does Picasa do?   Photo Viewer ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today's video is the 2nd of a four part series where I share my tools and processes for organizing and accessing photos.  In the first video, I covered pruning and centralizing quarterly onto my PC.  In this video, I'll talk about how I organize simply.  I know myself well enough to know that whatever organization system I adopted better be simple or I would have a hard time sticking with it for the long term. What that means to me is, I can't have a bunch of nesting folders with designations that won't make sense in the future. I'll throw my mom under the bus and give her complicated organizational schema as an example.  She came up with (what I consider to be) somewhat arbitrary top level groupings (family, friends, grandkids, church).  Then under these files, she has folders for events that are sometimes labeled by date, but sometimes just thrown in willy nilly. Some have subfolde...

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....