how do you organise your photos?

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I have 6000+ photos on my computer. just on my computer. Which could die, or get stolen or whatever.

this is no good for my descendants.

What do I dooooo?

i can't print them all off, but how do you decide and categorise? PLEASE give me tips! PLEASE!

i started putting all of my photos into month order- so as i loaded them on i put them in the year they were taken and the month if i knew... im now regretting this!
i have probably as many photos as you and its horrific to find anything! better option might have been to do them by year, then sub folder by event e.g. julies birthday ?

I create a folder for the year, and then a sub-folder for the month. If there's a special occasion like birthdays and christmas then I create a sub-folder for that event. I transfer the photos onto a removable hard drive. I used to create an additional backup onto CD but I've become lazy about doing that. If you're particularly sentimental about the photos you really should keep a backup away from home incase of a fire, there are online places that will allow you to store backups on their servers - something like smugmug. Or you could create a backup onto CD and leave that with a relative or friend.

Folder for each month, and for each holiday/special event.

I then create photo books with highlights of holidays and 3-6 month periods, otherwise we'd never look at them.

I started going through our photo archive and creating these for old holidays too.

How about cloud storage e.g Picasa or Flickr

Organised in folders and then I aim to do an annual photobook (last one covered two years...oops!)

Then I have a hard copy, the software does provisional placing in date order once I've picked the photos out and they are nice and slim on the shelf.

thanks for these - good idea, photobooks by year! That sounds much easier than printing everything.

Can any of you recommend where to get one from?

Hi photobox are really good. We have a few of theirs, very easy to create and cheap, but not cheap looking iyswim.

Also if you create an account now, before you are ready to purchase,you will start to get money off vouchers through. Some of the discounted ones have to be created in two weeks some three months so just remember that..

I think you can maybe create one for purchasing later?

Good luck!

I was also going to recommend photobox. Always look at their promotions page before ordering though!

even before you start organising them, backup onto DVDs or CDs and pass a few copies round. Don't leave them in or next to the PC where they will be destroyed by the same fire or flood or whatever.

Do that will all the other important files that you will miss when they go. Preferably monthly.

I have mine in many orders and all ds's are still by week, but think I need to group by special events as well. I also use Carbonite to back up everything on my computer, so I never have to worry about losing any photos etc as it automatically backs up anything I put on my laptop.

Mine are in folders by Year and in each year by month. I print a few each year but I'm always behind.
You must back up! Always have at least two copies before you delete from your camera.
I have a separate hard drive like this on which I have copies of important stuff including photos.

Photobooks are lovely but to be sure you don't lose the majority of them and to make them easier to look at you need to do all three of these:

1. When you download your pics, put them in a folder named by the month and year - this will show in the left hand side in Picasa. Go back and move all your old ones into folders of month/year too - shouldn't take that long as you can do them in batches.

1. Get a portable hard drive and do a complete back-up. Anything like these will do the trick and it's very easy to do: www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=portable+hard+drive&x=0&y=0

1. Download Picasa. It's a brilliant way of easily filing and viewing your photos. You can also do simple fixes like cropping and contrast with it: picasa.google.com/

This thread has reminded me that i'm over-due to do a back-up, off to do it now!

I'm in the process of doing this for my family's entire collection. I have a number of professional photographers in the family so its turning into something of a mission. I have thousands to work through; I'm in the process of scanning everything that isn't digitised.

I'm using flickr for the most part and I'm making up books (with notes on who people in the photos are) on snapfish. The idea is to ultimately make copies for other members of the family who don't have family photos, for a collection to be passed on to future generations.

I have an external hard drive to store them on, and I'm filing by family members for older photos and for my new photos I file by event. I'm also planning to backup to DVD once I've sorted everything properly.

The big thing is making some sort of record of who people are, if you are saving them for future generations. They are fairly meaningless if you don't know who is in the pictures...

BTW if you use something like snapfish - put 3 - 5 pics a page and use the promo codes to massively reduce cost. And put a contents page in there too. You will need to be selective about best pictures, but if you arrange into albums like this, people will actually be able to view them and make sense of them.

Good thread, it is something I worry about too.

We have a separate removable hard drive. It has tons of storage si we back up all of our photos on that.

we can also connect the hard drive to the tv to look through the photos / videos and we put movies on it too.

On the laptop, photos are in per event and theres also a folder named DD witg months inside of all the photos and videos we take of her we are pfb

Oh and if you upload to flickr, you can grab them easily to snapfish as they have an arrangement that allows you to transfer them over easily.

I had a hard disc failure a number of year ago and lost a bunch of photos which thankfully I had some copies of uploaded online... so yeah hard backup and online backup are ways to go ime.

lurks for ideas, good thread

I do the computer organizing as others stated above...Year Folder, Dated Event Subfolder. But then within each Dated Event Subfolder, I do a sub-sub folder called PRINT and I print out those photos. I am pretty selective and might only print out 5 or 6 in a batch of 30. I then put these photos in these clear photo books from Muji. They are very childproof (the oldest of mine are 15 years and have lasted through multiple step kids and my kids pawing through them regularly). I put the date and a list of the Dated Event Subfolders on the spine of the book. The advantage of doing it this way is that I'm not bogged down by arranging photos in an album (in the old days this used to keep me from ever doing anything with my photos).

Also please don't forget to backup your photos to multiple places. The cloud is the safest....I use CrashPlan . They are cheap and very user friendly (and mac compatible).

External hard drive kept at home, with a folder per year, dated subfolders. And a second hard drive in work with the same setup, just in case (I really love my photos!).

I used to do photobooks and really enjoyed doing it, but it was a fairly involved affair with Photoshop and very time consuming. These days I don't really have the time, Photoshop doesn't my netbook screen, my desktop no longer fits in the house and I can't bring myself to do an album with less powerful software so I'm a bit stuck :(

I use Picasa, it's really good. It has face recognition so you can find all the pics of one person for example. I organise them by year and then by month, but special events or holidays get a folder of their own. I go through and delete bad photos or duplicates. I also back up to an external hard drive but am thinking of getting some sort of online back up as well. After all if the PC perished in a fire so would the external hard drive.

I organise them by year & then either month or special occasion.

I use Picassa so all photos I put on the laptop are automatically backed up by google to a cloud. I mark the best ones of the kids & add them to a special album that I share with the GPs.

I did a photo book for each of the DCs first year & will one day get round to doing one for the family each year - I'm hoping it won't be too time consuming as I have already marked the best ones of the kids....

My BILs house burnt down last month. They lost ALL the photos stored on the laptops/external drives as they couldn't get back into the house to save them....

Argh, just realised I have 6000+ too. Had no idea it was that many.

Ours are also organised by month. We have them on external HD too. I think I'm going to copy them to my parent's PC sometime soon as you've now scared me.

We have strict monthly internet limits and a slooow connection so uploading regularly would be quite a pain in the arse and would probably cost us money.

13,267 - how many pictures of the DC smeared in yogurt do I need?!!

The uploading thing is a complete PITA to begin with, but wasn't too bad once I got up-to-date. You could just upload/backup the very best ones?

I give the album a description usually. For DC's it's a folder of their name and then subfolders of their Age. These hold random prints that wouldn't go in wider folders e.g. of a holiday. Get ruthless - if you have 20 shots of your DC eating tea or in the bath (I have been known to do this...), narrow it down to 2 or 3 really good ones.

The ones you really don't want to lose: Make photobooks - for some reason I prefer Photobox for this and Snapfish for prints. The latter's books are not as good. Backup to external hard drive. Save down to CD.