how do you organise your photos?

[HamblesHandbag]

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 create a new folder each month and add the pictures at the end of the month (backing up onto a disk and an external hard drive). The plan being is to create a photobook once a year for evermore so that we have a libaray for DS (and DP and I) to look back on for ever more.

Lots of great ideas. I find the hardest bit is deleting any... If I could bringmyself to sift through it would be miles easier. Much more of an issue with ds1... Nowhere near as many of ds2!

External hard drive kept elsewhere? Check dates in correct month and year when uploaded, as hard to remember afterwards.

I have over 75000 photos on my computer. I use Lightroom, which is a processing package, and I'd say the best way of keeping them organised is to use it, or something like it, as it has all sorts of ways of organising your files. no matter wat you use its a good idea to save your files by year, month and event or person...so I have a 2012 folder, which is split into 12 months, amd under each month I have a seperate file for each event. If it's not an event I'll just call it 'kids' or 'hubby' etc.

Oh and for backup I have a 2 tb hard drive that I backup to, it's set up to backup once a day. we print a photo book every year for my Mum who keeps things much better than I do, and we also out a lot of things on flickr and FB. this way if my Mac and Backuo were damaged or stolen I'd still have access to images going back years. You can buy a Fickr pro account which gives you unlimited online storage.

Crashplan have a system for backing up to a friend's pc/mac over the internet for free.
I really do recommend a cloud back up for the reasons stated above and also, external hard drives die. I had my laptop die and my external hard drive die at the same time. Luckily I had backed up my back up about a week before and only lost a week's worth of data....after that I have done cloud backups and it's been fantastic. I have had 2 hard drives die and not an ounce of trouble recovering my data from the cloud.

Our photos are stored by type in main folders and then subfolders eg.

ROTARY - casino night 2010, carnival, 999 stand
CAKES - weddings, cupcakes, christenings
HOLIDAYS - Honeymoon, Paris 2007, Paris 2008, Devon March 11, Devon Nov 11
FAMILY - Jan 12, Feb 12
WEDDINGS - Debbie, Lydia, Emily, Us

I find the easiest way to search is by type of photo hence why they are organised this way.

About 50% of the pictures are uploaded on a zip drive. Must upload the rest.

We were burgled earlier this year and our laptops stolen where all our photos were stored - luckily we had backed up to an external hard drive which they didn't take, so I can definitely recommend backing up!

I save them by year on my computer, then upload them to ye old photobucket in year folders as well (creating subfolders rarely - thus far my only ones are each child's first month to make finding their newborn pictures easier). I tried having a bunch of sub-folders but that got too complex for my liking so I just do basic photo tagging (roughly time of year (eg. Summer 2012) and who is in the picture, with other stuff if out of the ordinary) to make searching for a particular shot easier. After that, I copy the photos onto my back-up hard-drive and my DH's backup hard-drive before erasing them from my camera. Picture gifts are particularly asked for by family so I spread the best ones around that way, though I'm considering making year photo books.

On my computer (and in the backups) I have a separate folder for shots the kids have taken, but I don't tend to upload them unless they want to send them to someone.

I have lots of video around as well, though haven't figured out anything nice to do with them (other than procrastinating by playing with the video editor...).

I use iPhoto that comes with my Mac. It's really good, you can browse your photos using many views. Like by year, by events (ie imports), by faces, by location (if you have gps enabled camera and phone). You can create smart albums too. For example, I have albums of DD first 6mo, second 6mo etc, which defined as dates with DD face.

Physically, under the bonnet, iPhoto stores all your photos on the harddrive by events, ie imports. So you aren't actually completely tied in if you want to export all your photos to windows in the future. You just lose all the cool browsing features.

My photos are automatically backed up to a time capsule, which is a apple network enabled storage device.

Oh and a bonus is iPhoto is automatically backed up on the iPhone so I can show everyone all the photos of my DD whenever I want . On the phone it's also grouped automatically by location, albums, events, faces, etc. Very very slick.

I file by year too but I don't use 'months' but 'quarters' to sub file them.

so 2012q1, 2012q2 etc

Great thread as I've been meaning to ask. I lost photos of DD2's first Xmas as Mac dies and I didn't have backup's up to date :(

Ideally I'd like a proper back up into the 'cloud' and be able to access this for eternity. Does this exist? Does it cost much?

I file by year and subheadings. I've always found Picassa a bit of a PITA for some reason, find windows pictures easier, maybe tis because I am not a techy person. I upload to photobucket, it takes forever because our internet connection is incredibly slow, but tried uploading to Picasa online and that was even slower so stick with photobucket (must do some more, good reminder.)

Then I do Yearbooks also, from Photobox. Photobox do v cheap 4x6 prints if you can be bothered to do photo albums, we did for a while but just cba more lately.

An external hard drive is a good idea.

I also don't know what to do with all our video clips, I like mucking around on PowerDirector but it would take forever to collate them all into something. I do worry about losing these as they won't upload, but I guess this is where CDs/hard drive come in.

Must get more organised.

HipHop you can back up anything onto the cloud. It's just internet stroage. But they get expensive quick if you have very large photo albums. Have a look at Apple's iCloud (if you are still using your mac), or Dropbox. They all have a small amount of storage for free so you can try it out. Iirc I have around 3Gb on drop box for free. I only use iCloud for my calendar and address book, so that's nothing either.

Defintely worth a look into network storage, like the time capsule.

Thanks One It's something I do need to spend some time on.
Thing is I'd like a lasting solution, that is inexpensive (wouldn't we all).
I mean what happens if you pay for cloud storage for 15 years and then can't pay anymore for whatever reason?

I have thousands and thousands of photos .............

That's why I back up onto my time capsule instead. It's just an external networked hard drive, which cleverly backs up your mac automatically. I leave it on a top shelf next to my ADSL router/modem. Completely out of the way.

For windows, they are called NAS.

DH has been talking about getting one for ages so he can stream movies to the TV! I am thinking it might be his Xmas present :)

Crashplan are very cheap if you just get the home option (i.e. no high level encrypting of your files...). I signed up for a 3 year plan and it costs me $3 a month for unlimited storage (don't forget pictures take up a lot of space so you really need the unlimited option).

thank you so much for all these suggestions, and apologies I've not been back sooner - I've got a new baby feeding two hourly and every time I start to read through this thread properly, I have to go and do something else!

So I've managed to cobble together a photobook via iPhoto on my mac and I'm waiting for it to arrive.

tried photobox as I keep being sent money off codes (don't know why?) but could only find uploading one photo at a time. Am I missing something? I have 6000 photos, one at a time is no good! even 50 photos for an album is too slow for one by one.

Also tried uploading to flickr and dropbox, but they seem to organise by file name - 00005928.jpg etc, is that right? Whereas I'm used to iPhoto which separates into dates and events automatically.

When I've used the mac printing services in the past, I've found the quality not as good as others, but the convenience of using iPhoto seems to be outweighing other services at the moment.

I use a mac time machine for back ups, but it is now telling me it's full or something. I really need to back up online, or on a separate hardrive don't I? We lost a lot of baby photos to a burglar. Poor DS2 will think we weren't fussed about him!

iPhoto is definitely the way to go. Photo books are incredibly easy.

When you say you use a time machine for back up, is it a time capsule. Ie a little box that you connect to your network? Time machines does incremental backups. It means you can go back many many days of changes. For example, if you edit a file over a few days, you can get the version of the file, say, from 3 days ago. Unless your time capsule has a hard disk smaller than your mac, you shouldn't run out of space for all your files. You are running out from old archives. Look on your time machine software to find out why. You can tell it to remove archives. I remember doing something like that on mine many months ago.

Online space will be much more expensive than a drive at your home. My 5500 photo collection is 10gb. It will be cheaper to buy a new and bigger time capsule!

And yes online storage like Dropbox is arranged as files. They are not photo software.

I use photobox from my mac to print. But I upload the files one by one. I also use google picasa to share photos online. So that's back up of some of my photos. But that only give 1gb free I think. It won't fit my entire collection, but hey you can use it for your best photos? I think Flickr gives more space.

Thanks OneLittle. Yes it's the time capsule I'm using. I've just had some more memory added to my MacBook (it got full) so that will be why it's struggling.

And thanks for explaining the online options to me. It's a lot clearer now!