Organizing Pictures
My wife is a photo nut. Before the digital cameras, she would go through a roll a film in a week. On vacation we could have 20-30 rolls of film to develop. Thank god for the digital camera we bought. We are already on our second one she wore the last one out. It stopped working after 4 years. So we bought a new one last fall. With digital my wife takes even more pictures.
With 100s (more like 1000’s) of pictures being taken and stored on the computer, in envelopes and albums, how should we keep them organized? I am still figuring this one out as this is a work in progress. But here is what we are doing.
Digital pictures have brought their own set of problems. I don’t remember where I read this but digi-dumping is common. This is where you take the pictures off your camera and they are all over your hard drive. No organization. Creating computer clutter.
The software that came with our Cannon saved pictures by their shoot date. It gives a great chronological look at the past. We tried to start to group pictures but it became too time consuming. So we stuck with the chronological order. It just works.
We have 2 external hard drives with copies of all the digital pictures. One is at our house and one is at my work (offsite backup). So if we have a hard drive failure we will still have our pictures.
Actual clutter
The pictures that are loose we are collecting from around the house to put in one are to go through. I am thinking of setting up a plastic shoe box and starting to try to date them to put in chronological order as well. Then we will have a record of time of the kids growing up. The birthdays in order. The Christmas’ in order.
The albums are in storage in the basement. Not the worst place but not the best place for them. I would love to have all on them converted to digital pics but the cost involved is way too much. So they will sit there for now. They are off the floor so they won’t get wet and they are protected from the sun.
The slides are the ones that may be soon lost. They are yellowing and fading. But they are also from my childhood when slide projectors were the in thing. These will be the first I will have converted to digital.
Problems yet to solve
I would however like to rename the digital pictures from IMG00015.jpg to something more meaningful. Also I remember my grandparents writing on the back of the prints, who the people were so they could tell us well that was Aunt Betty’s friend, Josephine. If I could figure out how to do this in the digital age, it would be great.
I am not quite at a point to upload our photos to the web. Like I said my wife is a photo nut and I do not want to pay for storing them online.
It is a start. If you have ideas to the above problems I would like to hear them, please leave them in the comments section.
Just my 2 cents. Jim @ ChangeJarSavings.com
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