| The easiest way to organize your photo collection is to create a Digital Photo Hub. Designate one location to be the home of all your photos and videos. Make a new folder and call it Photo Hub. It can be on your computer, if you have space, or on an external hard drive. I don’t recommend a cloud storage site for your Hub as we need wifi to access it, and we don’t control changes the company decides to make. That being said, lots of people no longer have computers. Life is becoming more mobile. If this is you, a cloud storage site is your best bet. |
Make a list of all the devices and locations where you have photos and videos. Begin moving your digital photos and videos to your Photo Hub folder. Keep track with your list as you move things to help prevent duplicates. Move your photos and videos into a source file named for the device, “iPhone 6” or “Red Camera”. If you think of this project as a treasure hunt it’s much more fun!
Once you have everything stored in your Photo Hub it’s easy to find your photos and videos, organize them, and back them up. Digital cameras embed the date the photo was taken into the metadata of the photo. This makes them easy to organize chronologically. Set up chronological folders in the Digital Photo Hub and sort your photos and videos from the source folders to the chronological folders. Create a “To Review” folder and use it to store any photos that will require more research.
Every year create a new folder in your Digital Photo Hub and collect all the photos and videos from the year into that folder. Back up your Digital Photo Hub and check you back up copies regularly. Now it will be easy to find your photos and videos when you want them!