Just how do you keep digital photos organised??

[bibblebobblebubble]

Not sure this is Housekeeping exactly, but it certainly requires organisational skills I'm sorely lacking.

I have thousands upon thousands of digital photos. Some are on an ancient Macbook and I think backed up somewhere on a hard drive but I haven't checked for ages. Some are on my current laptop and only very sporadically backed up. Then there's my phone (memory now full), and I had a digital camcorder with little cassettes and can't even remember how to watch them.

I've done nothing about this for a long time but now it is really stressing me. I'm worried I will lose precious videos and photos. I never sit and browse what we do have as it's all too disorganised. And we have hardly any family photos up around the house.

I'd like to tackle this as a project over the next couple of months but I need inspiration on how to do it. I want to love my photos! Any ideas?

1. For ease I'd put all in same place e.g. On laptop.
2. BACKUP! NOW!! And properly. I have a copy on a cloud which automatically updates but that won't help if I got crypto or similar, so I also backup periodically to a USB key. 3 copies (laptop, cloud, USB) is my minimum for back ups for stuff as irreplaceable as photos.
3. Change your view on the laptop from little images to detail. If you are lucky the date will be there and will be accurate. That's your starting point for organizing - sort by date.

I have stuff in folders for holidays, but the rest is thrown in and I sort by date.

I tried software to identify and automatically label with people's names but it was a bit shit and time consuming so gave up. Do let me know if you find anything better!

I pay a couple of quid a month for cloud storage - Google drive. I've created folders for topics and within each is a YYYY-MM folder. I save important electronic doc on there too.

I like the ability to share folders so whole family can look at baby pics.

DH sorts ours.
All photos as on the PC. Photos from all our phones/tablets get automatically loaded by an app from which DH puts them on the computer. All photos are also on a hard drive in our fireproof box as well as uploaded to a remote server somewhere (think we pay about £8 a month for this)
Photos are literally the ONLY thing you can't replace if they get lost/damaged/burnt in a fire so they are actually more important to keep safe and back up than laptops and TVs etc!

DH files all photos in folders of the year then sub folders of either the event - Xs 1st birthday party/ holiday to France/school play etc or if just miscallaneous then they are in a folder of the month.

Makes it very easy to find photos.

Hi OP, it's hard to keep up isn't it? I try to keep all digital copies in folders organised by year and months.

Every year at about Christmas time (when i've historically had some time off) I gather photos from phones, cameras, social media etc and organise them. Then I get them printed into photo books.

All our photos are on a hard drive. We have subfolders within 'photos' for each year and then twelve subfolders within each 'year' for each month. So to look at photos from August 2012 it would be:

Photos / 2012 / August

Same for videos only under 'Videos'.

We are going to get another hard drive and copy everything across as it's silly only having one copy of all our precious photos and videos!

We are able to plug the hard drive straight into our TV and view everything on there.

I'm rubbish too but aim to make one photo book a year with my favourite memorable moments - holidays/Christmas etc. I like the permanence of paper! Even if you just have 50-100 printed photos a year you will be happy in years to come I reckon.

I download and file them on lap top , i cloud and hard drive in folders named in months and years. Try to do this two or three times a year so I can clear my phone storage . I also make an annual photo book on snapfish or photobox for each DC.

Ooh replies thanks!

Don't people eventually run out of computer memory? We only have a laptop not a desktop. I ought to transfer all the stuff from the old one to this one, but it might use up too much space - I only have 30GB out of 250GB free.

Get an external hard drive?