Creating and sharing your memories as digital photos is something that everyone can enjoy. So what are some of the basics you need to know to get the most from your photos?
Digital photos need careful organization in a clean manner that gives you the access you need. Images you don’t want should get deleted right away, while photos you wish to keep should get edited and stored safely. Above all, you need to have at least one or two backup methods to prevent loss.
Put some careful thought into a method that will work for you and create some positive habits to put it into practice. Then, you will be able to enjoy your digital photos indefinitely and share them with whomever you please.
Organizing Your Digital Photos
It’s a good idea to come up with a system for organizing your digital photos. Usually, this is in the form of a folder system with a naming convention. Something that I like to use is date-descriptor. If you use something similar, your computer will sort all of your folders by date, and you’ll be able to easily pick out which folder you want to open by the descriptor. The descriptor can get broken up even further.
For example, ‘date-broad descriptor-specific descriptor’. It may end up looking something like ‘Aug 28 2025-Kids-Theme Park’ or ‘Jul 4 2027-Bike-Sturgis’. If you are diligent with labeling your folders and properly placing your photos, you’ll have a much easier time going through them later. If you have many photos, you may want to set up folders by year and then drop all of the folders for that year into their respective folder.
The good thing about a system like this is that you can set it up on your computer at home, in cloud storage, or on a separate physical copy. However, it’s a good idea to keep a single master copy that you use to organize everything. If you have more than one place that you store different photos, it can become a bear to keep organized and prevent losses. In addition, the amount of time to maintain it will be more than you’re willing to put in.
Manage the Volume of Photos
It’s effortless to take many digital photos of the same thing when you’re trying to get a good shot. But, equally important is the effort to go through the images you’ve taken and delete the versions you don’t intend to keep. If you don’t do this, you will soon have a massive collection of sub-par photos, making it challenging to find the copies you want. In addition, the clutter wastes your time and uses up storage space that could store images you wish to keep.
Most phones have built-in apps or apps you can download, letting you do some quick edits to your photos. For example, you can add captions, brighten them up, or use filters. It’s a good idea to do this kind of adjustment right away while the inspiration for the shot is still fresh in your mind.
Another helpful feature that these apps have is some of them let you compress the image. Most images are enormous when first taken. If you can squeeze them down to a smaller size while keeping the image quality, it makes them easier to store and share.
Once you’ve gone through your photos and deleted the versions you don’t want, and you’ve made any edits to them that you would like, it’s a good idea to get them into your file system for storage. Once safely transferred, you can delete them from your device.
For one, they eat up valuable storage, but what if you lose your device? Perhaps you would like to keep them on your phone so that you can show them to others. That’s fine, but it’s still essential to get a copy of your images into your long-term storage process. Better safe than sorry!
Back-Up Your Photos
Have good back-ups is arguably the most important thing you should take away from this article. At this point, you should have your file system set up and your precious photos stored. Now you need to decide how you will back everything up. Unfortunately, the possibility of fire, flood, or some other disaster is a reality.
There’s also the chance you could lose your phone, or the hard drive you’re using to store your photos fails, causing you to lose everything. There are multiple ways to back up your photos, but each comes with its positives and negatives.
Recordable Media
Recordable media includes anything that you can write to from your computer and remove it. SD cards, CDs, or DVDs are part of this group. These can be a good option, but you will need a system for organizing your physical media collection. It’s also important to note that CDs and DVDs have five to ten years of shelf life. However, some manufacturers claim ten to twenty-five years.
The bottom line is, there’s a shelf life, so your approach needs to take that into account. SD cards use flash memory, which isn’t affected by age but by how many writes and rewrites occur. So it effectively wears out with use.
External Drives
A popular storage method is where you keep one or more external drives with your data on them. External drives are a popular option, but I’ve had a bad experience before. However, some people have extensive collections of external drives with their data, which works well for them.
I’ve experienced a total data loss situation when the hard drive became corrupted for some unknown reason. I was able to reuse the hard drive, but my data got lost. I believe the secret to this is to not carry it with you but rather to keep it on a shelf at home.
Network Area Storage or NAS
To me, this is one of the more stable options. Home network storage is now quite affordable and leverages RAID technology. RAID technology uses multiple hard drives to act like one hard drive, except if one fails, the hard drive can get replaced without any data loss. So if you set up a small NAS and keep a few spare hard drives on hand, you should be able to save your data for extended periods.
Photo Libraries
A slick option built into most phones is an online photo library. This technology lets you back up photos you’ve taken with your phone automatically to the cloud. Usually through your phone manufacturer, but not always. There are several settings you can change to get the backup experience you need. An added benefit is that you can add other users to your albums to automate sharing.
Online Storage/Cloud Storage
Online or cloud storage is a separate online drive space that you use as part of a free program or premium service. It’s something that exists independently from a photo library and can store any file type. Cloud storage is like an online hard drive where you upload and download files, or it can mirror a folder on your computer with files on the cloud. I find the mirroring option is the least amount of work to maintain with all of the benefits of cloud backup.
Printing
There’s something about holding a printed photo in your hand or flipping through a physical photo album. Even though the world has completely taken up digital photography for its benefits over traditional photography, people still like to print photos.
Printed photos can also make for a backup because they can be kept on hand or stored in a different location. In addition, printed images are capable of lasting for hundreds of years if appropriately protected. Happily, there are still many ways you can get printed copies of your photos available today.
Testing & Storing Back-Ups
Testing your back-ups is crucial because you want to ensure that your backup method will do what you need. Testing can be as simple as opening some of the files you’ve stored until you’re satisfied your images got backed up successfully.
Once you’re sure that the files are in your primary storage, you need to decide where you will store them and how many copies you will store. If you’re using an online service, the location of their servers is in play. If you are using some form of storage that results in you storing them in your home, you may want to consider having at least one other copy and storage location that isn’t. That way, if disaster strikes, you increase the chances that your back-ups will survive.
Good luck with your photos!