Organizing Your Photos

Cheryl Osler
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read

Have you ever tried to find a picture that you want to show someone and you knew it was on your phone but you couldn’t find it in a hurry? How about on your computer? Are your photos just listed in your photos gallery on your computer by a random number or “Image” number. Would you like some tips to show you how to organize your digital and physical photos? ? In this post I’m going to give you a few tips so that the next time you want to find a picture quickly it will be right at your fingertips. Just keep reading for my top tips to help you.

Let’s start with your digital photos. The first think you’re going to want to do is to declutter. By that I mean that you go through them all and delete or throw away any duplicates or any that are so blurry that you can’t make them out and also any of random scenery that you’re not somehow attached to. Start by putting them in stacks — one stack for the duplicates and blurry ones that you are going to throw away. One for those that you definitely want to keep, and one for those that you’re just not sure about yet.

Next, you take the stack that you know that you want to keep and group like with like. That means you can either sort by event — say a specific vacation — or you can sort by dates. You can also sort by person, so choose what makes sense to you. If you’re really into organizing like I am you can do both date and event like I do. I sort by event and then the pictures in that event by date order. You can also use the option I mentioned above of sorting by person if that is what you want to do.

You really should write in pencil on the back of each one the date, location and people in them. If you’re not sure of the exact date, do the best you can — say the month and year or just the year if that’s all you can do. Hopefully, you will remember who everyone is in the pictureJ. You’re now ready to put them in a scrapbook or photo album organizing them by whichever method you choose — date, event or person.

Now, for your digital photos: you want to start with the same decluterring process but with your digital photos you can just delete the duplicates and out of focus shots. That should clean out a bunch of them. Then create a folder in your photos gallery for whichever way you decide to sort — date or event or person and then name each folder with that date, person or event. You can then click and drag the photos to the appropriate folders. Once you do that you can also arrange the folders by date or event or person in your gallery.

Now that you have them organized by either event, date or person you can go into each folder and title each picture with the date, location and people individually. As with the physical photos, hopefully you will remember the dates and locations but if not do the best that you can.

For security reasons, I recommend that you save the photos that are dear to your heart in three places: a flash drive, your computer and some form of cloud based service like Drobox or Evernote. You can also use Google Photos, which lets you search by any type of title to find them quickly.

I also recommend that you set aside 30 minutes every month to go through this process so you can clean up your phone’s camera role insuring that you don’t lose any of your digital photos.

You’ll feel accomplished and good about yourself when you finish and you’ll have these memories to pass down to your children and grandchildren. It’s part of your legacy and your family will know exactly what they meant to you because you’ve taken the time to label them all. Take it from someone who inherited a couple of great physical photo albums from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and none of the pictures have any labels. I can only identify a couple of my relatives in them. It breaks my heart that I don’t know who the rest of them are!

To get more tips on organizing your photos and paperwork sign up for my newsletter at www.cherylosler.com where I’ll also be sending out invitations for online classes that I’ll be holding to teach you how to organize all your paperwork — including your photos.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade