How To Organize Photographs…Both Old and New

Keeping and Making Memories with Photographs

Everyone is a photographer now.  We love to photo every holiday and gathering.  Our kids, pets, food, sporting events, and travels all are documented in details unimaginable 20 years ago.  Honestly, we are all getting pretty good at capturing our life in photographs.  However, have we created a new level of stress for ourselves about how to actually organize these photographs so we can enjoy them?

Happy Motivational “Memorial Day” Monday!

Finding Our Favorite Photographs

Here we are with another holiday happening and a few (or hundreds) of great photos are being snapped at family cookouts and vacations.   Now they are sitting in your phone with the thousands of others you are “going to do something with soon”.  Right?  These photos are really easy to find, enjoy and share quickly with others because you have the worlds best memory and eyesight to find them.  Right again? And let’s not even begin the conversation of how to physically house all these treasures!

Ah, maybe Imogene was ahead of her time.  Maybe her favorite was always yet to come so she could immediately find it!

The Life Of Our Photographs

As the pinhead historian of our family, I am better than some at organizing photos.  We have evolved from the smelly albums that left black all over our hands, and the sticky yellowed cellophane books that ruined so many shots.  For special events we now create beautiful memory books our friends and families cherish…mostly because they are relieved they do not have to deal with their own photos of the same event still lingering in their phone.

However, we still had photos in boxes, on our phones and in nicely organized files on a computer.  Too many fantastic memories all scattered about even when technically organized.  Perhaps by now this is sounding way to familiar and you are feeling as anxious as I have been about the family history!

Simple Steps To Organize Photos

1. As soon as you snap that photo, create an album to save it on your phone. Most smart phones have this feature and it is easy to use.  Start today with new photos and go back and add others to the albums as you get inspired.   Use labels for the albums that are meaningful to you.  I use each kids/grandkids name, families names, names of each trip and event.  Pretend your phone is your full shoe box housing your photos with neat little dividers
2. Get those photos up in the clouds to enjoy on all your (and your loved ones) electronic devices.  Do a bit of research and find out what program will work best for you.  They all work IF you take the few steps to get your priceless photos uploaded.  Google, Apple, and almost all of the photo scanning apps have this ability.  Yours truly uses a double system of Icloud and the Photomyne.  Note:  All of our paper photos are in a water tight box, separated and passed on to family members who want them.  We’ve even thrown some away (gasp) that are not claimed.
3. Photo Scanning Apps…use them. Steps 1 and 2 above can be done automatically with a good scanning app.  You can scan every paper photo you own quickly and place into cloud albums directly.  Albums you have created in cell phones, or saved on your computer can also easily be uploaded to the same app.  Lastly, if you train yourself ever so slightly you can actually take the photo on your phone thru the app and add it to new or existing albums the very same time you take the photo!

The app I have chosen to us, is Photomyne.  We are not affiliates for this site and do not receive any kind of compensation to promote this photograph scanning and organizing program.  This is simply the one that is working for us.  Having all our photos together, accessible from our phone, iPads or computers has given us a way to enjoy 30+ years of memories over and over again.  We have a system that will work for every memory from now on.

Full disclosure:  To date, we have uploaded over 10K photos.  Currently there is not a way to alphabetize the albums in the system.  We’ve found that making the cover photo of each album something we quickly recognize works for us.  We chose to subscribe annually to Photomyne and have unlimited storage.  For the price of a cheap dinner out once…our kids will never have to sort thru a shoe box for their memories!

In my mind, I was only committed to try this app once for free and see if it worked.  Honestly, it was “me” who had to get onboard with this daunting process of organzing a life of memories.  Living in an active hurricane zone scared me about how easily paper photos can be lost and so I made it a goal to at least scan the paper by this season.  A funny thing happened while I was dreading this task…it worked so quickly it inspired me to use the system all the time.

Start Organizing Photos With Your Next Vacation

Just do it.  Vacations are the perfect time to try a new system like a photo organizing app.  Join the pinhead group I’m in, that cell phone is never leaving our hand anyway…might as well learn how to make it work even harder for us!

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