February Challenge: Organizing Photos (Back Up)

This month the theme is organizing photos.  Something I'm thankful that I already have a system for.  True sometimes I get behind on keeping that system going but, just the same I have a system in place.

While it would be ideal to sit down every time I take photos and to go through them that is just not in my time table.  Instead I go through them about once a month, sometimes more if I have the chance.  As I mentioned in a previous post I use and LOVE Creative Memories Memory Manager software. I could not live without it in organizing photos. So as not to repeat myself, see the previous post if you want more information on this product.

To start my monthly organization I take my camera, iphone, and ask my husband to email me, any photos that he has taken, and load them into Memory Manager. 

Next, I sort through them and delete the ones that are really not any good. When sorting I try to rate the ones that I really like, with the star rating system that is in the program.  I sort them into various folders, which is great because 1 photo, does not need to be saved 5 times to be located in the various folders.  For example a picture of all of my family goes in the year folder, and each of our individual folders.  From there if I need to find a picture I can just search based on what I am looking for.

As I come across photos that I would like to share, I can quickly email them to the person I want to share them with, post them on Facebook, or print them out.

Finally, and this is the challenge for the week, I back up all of my photos to a DVD.  Once they are backed up, I delete them from my phone and camera so that I have more space on both of those devices.  At the end of the year, I also back up the entire year to our external drive. 

I store the DVD's currently in my home, but have been thinking about how important it is to move them to another home or location.  The reason for this is I would like to think we will never have a fire, but should it happen, I'd like to be able to get to my photos again.  I think for me this will be the challenge step, to find a safe container to store them in, label and then find the person who would be willing to keep that container in their home.

Don't forget to back up your photos! Computers are great, but we all know the horror stories of people losing everything.  Memory Manager reminds you periodically to back up your photos too, which is also wonderful, because sometimes on our own we'd forget.