How to Organize Your Photos – Part One, the System

I spent the entire month of January organizing my digital photos and making photo books.  In fact, I still have two more photo books to make before the Groupon/Living Social promotions expire.  I am currently fighting with Picaboo to create our 2012 book and then I have one more snapfish credit to use.  Even though I have not finished my books, I am multitasking and want to get started with the highly anticipated post on how to organize your photos while my photos upload to Picaboo (which, by the way, is taking FOREVER.)

If you recall in the post, How to Organize Your Photos – Part Zero, you had some homework.  I asked you to think about what you want to do with your digital photos in the future.  Do you simply want to make sure they are safe and you will not lose them?  Do you want to make photo albums with your favorites?  Maybe you want to print out every single photo.  Pause and think about your goals for a second before we move on.

After some thought I came up with the following goals for our photos:

1. All of our photos must be safely backed up somewhere, ideally in the cloud.

2. I must be able to find any photo quickly.

3. I want to make an album of the best photos from each calendar year.

4. I want to make Belén and Eloise a photo album for every year of their life.

5. Each December, I want to easily be able to make a calendar with the best photos from the year to give as gifts to grandparents and aunties.

6. I want to be able to go to one place and view our favorite travel photos.  I’ve already made an album of our favorite travel photos but I will likely update it one day.

7. I want to store photos with Belén and Eloise together to one day make a “Sisters” album.

8. I want to one day make a Camping album for Andy.

Keeping these goals in mind, with the help of my husband, I came up with the following photo organization system.

Step 1: Figure out where you will store your photos.

We have A LOT of photos.  For a couple of years there we were shooting in RAW, which means the file formats are  proprietary and need to be processed, plus the files are large and often create a need for two versions of the file, both RAW and JPEG.   After I took a Photoshop class from David at Cole Marr last year, I was convinced to switch to shooting in JPEG.  That little decision has simplified both my photo post-processing and organizing.

If you want to know more about shooing in RAW versus JPEG, check out this well-informed comparison on shooting in both formats.  My point to all of this is that is we could fit all of our photos and videos and music on a single removable hard drive but being that these are photos, the ONE worldly possession we don’t want to lose, we have elected to store our hundreds of Gigabytes of media on a personal-sized Synology RAID array that looks an awful lot like this.

For those of you normal folks who don’t work in a technology company and use RAID in your vocabulary on a daily basis, a RAID stands for a “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks” and the benefit that it brings to the table is the ‘R’, the redundancy.  If one disk fails, no problem!  Everything that was on the failed disk has been duplicated on one or more of the other disks so as long as the entire thing isn’t melted in a fire, or something, your files are safe.

Our RAID’s name is Sassy, after our late labrador retriever, and she gives us the peace of mind that two out of her five drives can fail and our data will not be lost.  She is plugged into our network and loaded into each of our computers as a shared drive.  She is protected by a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) which prevents power surges that damage computers and if the power goes out, Sassy runs on batteries on the UPS.  If those batteries get low, Sassy will shut herself down in a safe manner which prevents data corruption.  When any of these out of the ordinary things start to happen, Sassy sends us an email so we are aware of the problem.

Andy did A LOT of research before he purchased the components of this system.  There are many personal RAIDs on the market but Synology was rated the best by far.  One thing to note is that most of the Synology RAIDs do not come with hard drives so they need to be purchased separately.  Synology’s website recommends “enterprise-ready” drives.  For the entire Synology system plus five 1-TB “enterprise-ready” drives and the UPS, we ended up spending roughly $1000 (this was two years ago) but the peace of mind it gives us is, well, priceless.  Cliché but true.

The only thing we could do that would be more secure is to store the files in the cloud or in an off premise location, but we will get to that in a future post.  Suffice it to say I prefer a combination of both on premise and cloud and it would be very expensive to store all of our data in the cloud.

Our solution may be overkill for many and another cheaper option would be to create your own version of a RAID by having two external drives and use both to back everything up to.  Working in high tech, you see how often hard drives fail so lets just say we are a bit preparanoid.

Sassy is organized with a folder for each type of media we care about: Videos, Photos, Music and Documents.  I don’t know that the “home” is for but I can’t delete it so it just hangs out.

Photos is what we care about so double-clicking on that folder and you will see a very simple structure which I thought about A LOT before implementing.

Step Two: Set up a folder for each year.

Step Three: Set up a folder for each “project,” in my case the albums I want to create.

One folder for each year as well as top-level photos for albums I know I will be making, Belén Rose, Best of Travel, Christmas Cards, Eloise Mae, Family Photos, Landscape and Sisters.  You can start to imagine how having each of these folders populated with the relevant photos will get me all of the goals I articulated earlier.

Double-click on Belén Rose and you will see a folder for her at each age.

Step Four: Under each year folder, set up day folders using the format “yyyy_mm_dd” and create a “Best of Year” folder.

Under each year, I create a folder for each day I download photos.  The format of “year_month_day,” all numeric, is important because it keeps the list of day folders in order for of the days in the year.  If you use words like “December_01″ and “March_15,” you will have December showing up in the list before March.

If there is a special day or photos I know I am going to want to access again in the future, I append an additional “_EventName” to the end of the date.  This scheme helps with Goal #2: Must be able to find any photo quickly.

Another important thing to note in the window above is that I also create a folder that is the best of the year, in this case, “Best of 2012.”  In addition, I keep the phone photos, “iPhone Photos” for me and “xoom Photos” for Andy in separate folders rather than moving each individual photo into the corresponding date folder (that takes a lot of effort, trust me on this one.)  I copy the phone folders over periodically, but at a minimum at the end of each year.

Step Five: Organize your photos.  

Now it is time to put this in motion and move your photos to the corresponding folders.  My recommendation is to get all of your existing photos into the right year folder and then call it good, unless you are super motivated or have a project you want to do that involves those photos.  In my case, I put the year photos in place and started following this system for any new photos I downloaded.  Then, as I go back and prepare to make albums for each year, I clean up the folders within that year.  My goal is to clean up one year per month in 2013 and have all of my backlog of books complete.

I have recently been making the albums “Eloise 0 – 1″, “Belén 2 – 3″ and “2011″ and “2012.”  So as I went back through the daily folders in 2011 and 2012, looking at every single photo briefly, I renamed folders to match the date format mentioned above, then each time I found a great photo of:

Eloise, I copied it to the “Eloise 0 – 1″ and “Best of 2012″or

Belén to “Belén 2 – 3″ and “Best of 2012″ or

the family to “Family Photos” and “Best of 2012″ or

the Golden Gate Bridge to “Best of Travel” or

a cute photo of Belén kissing Eloise to “Eloise 0 – 1,” “Belen 2 – 3,” “Sisters,” AND “Best of 2012.”

This scheme does create some duplicate photos but hey, we’ve got a RAID and storage is cheap so I have elected to take this approach in an effort to achieve the goals I listed above.

Speaking of the goals, lets take a look back at them:

1. All of our photos must be safely backed up somewhere, ideally in the cloud.

✓  I will talk about the cloud in Part Two.

2. I must be able to find any photo quickly.

✓  I’ve been using this organization scheme for awhile and I love it!

3. I want to make an album of the best photos from each calendar year.

✓  “Best of 20XX”

4. I want to make Belén and Eloise a photo album for every year of their life.

✓ and ✓

5. Each December, I want to easily be able to make a calendar with the best photos from the year to give as gifts to grandparents and aunties.

✓  Pull these directly out of “Best of 20XX” and I sometimes even create “Yearly Calendar” folder with the name of a month in which the photo will represent appended onto the name of each of the twelve best photos of the year, for example, “DECEMBER_Santa_Photo.jpg.”

6. I want to be able to go to one place and view our favorite travel photos.  I’ve already made an album of our favorite travel photos but I will likely update it one day.

✓  “Best of Travel” folder

7. I want to store photos with Belén and Eloise together to one day make a “Sisters” album.

✓  “Sisters”

8. I want to one day make a Camping album for Andy.

✓  I didn’t show this but inside the “Best of Travel” folder there is a “Camping” folder.

Step Six:  Copy all of your new photos to your storage location in the appropriate folder.

This is most important and oftentimes the most difficult.  We have multiple computers in our house and we don’t always download photos from our camera to the same computer.  Andy and I have a pact that whenever we download new photos to the computer, we immediately copy them over to sassy as well.  Again we have a lot of photos so it is not an option for us to keep all of our photos and media on one computer.  This means we have to delete old photos on our computers from time to time to make room for new ones.  Having to press the Delete key while some of your favorite  photos of your kid are selected is nerve-racking enough, you want to make sure you have a system in place that you trust before you press that Delete key.

So that’s it for today.  Has this been helpful?  I am by no means an organizational expert, but both Andy and I have spent a lot of time thinking about this topic.

In Part Two, I will discuss backing up your files to the cloud as well as using Snapfish, Shutterfly and Picaboo to make albums.  Leave a comment if there is anything else you would like to see addressed.

Happy Photo Organizing!

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Tagged as: how to organize your photos, photo organization methodology, photo organization system, picaboo, shutterfly, snapfish, Synology, uninterrupted power supply, ups