Let’s declutter! This time of year I want to air everything out, clean things up and make some breathing room!
April Tip – Spring Clean the Photos and Videos on your Phone
Most of us use our phones to easily take pictures and videos. It doesn’t take long before we find ourselves with LOTS of pictures and videos! Take advantage of some beautiful spring weather – grab a drink, find a sunny spot and spend a half hour cleaning up your phone. It will be the most enjoyable spring cleaning of the season!
Refer back to the February 2017 Newsletter to see the article “How do I Choose Photos to Delete?”
Clean up your Digital Photos
Many of us download our digital photos and videos to our computers. Often we end up downloading the same things more than once, to different files, stored in different places. Ugh. Every one of us lives with some kind of digital chaos within our photo collections. Let’s take a few steps to bring some order to that chaos:
1. Bring all your digital photos to one place. Search the files on your computer and bring everything to one location.
2. Scan this collection of photos for duplicates. Duplicates can be different sizes, rotated differently, named differently and even have different dates. There is some great software you can purchase to help with this task. I like Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder and Duplicate Cleaner on my PC and Photo Sweeper for the MAC.
3. Organize your photos by year. Create a folder for each year and start moving your photos into them.
If you can get through these steps your photo collection will feel MUCH better organized!
A Photo Organizer performs these tasks for you and can take the organization even further by renaming all of your images (I like to recommend YYYY-MM-DD (sequential number) so your photos STAY in order!), adding tags and keywords to make your photos searchable, creating an on-going maintenance plan and ensuring your collection is effectively backed up.
Declutter Your Out-Dated Media
As you are spring cleaning and airing out the house this month keep an eye out for any out-dated media cluttering up your space. I’m talking about the VHS tapes, bins of film, boxes of slides, camcorder bags, all that stuff you have been moving around for so long you don’t even see it anymore. It’s time to clear out the clutter and recover the memories trapped in there. Designate a box or bin as your collection point. When you come across this stuff put it in the box. When you have been collecting for a week give us a call. It’s that easy. We are happy to take care of that clutter for you and uncover the treasures that have been hidden for so long!