Shake it... like a Polaroid Picture

Well, not really, but since I decided that one of the things that I want to accomplish in 2013 is to be more organized...da, da, da, daaaa.....My greatest goal is to have working systems in place, for the kids, the hubby...me.  In result of that, and having a little more time for my hobbies, I would like to get back into my scrapbooking.  That is one of my absolute favorite things to do; and long, long overdue.  I get to be creative and it's my "me" time.  I love to reminisce about the fun times and memories we were making, and I love sharing that with my family.  More importantly, I get to make something for my family.   However, there are several things that need to fall into place in order to get back into scrapbooking.

Such as, organizing our photos on the computer and then organizing my craft room (which is the dump all room, for whatever reason) and create a workspace that will accommodate my many hobbies.

I took what I thought was the easy route, but turns out it is very time consuming...I am organizing my photos on my computer.  So, this morning, while the family was still sleeping, I got up and took advantage of a quiet house and started to group everything by years. And since we were a little behind the times, by like a million years, most of our photos are on 35mm, which are still in a box, patiently waiting to be gone through and grouped correctly. Yup, good ole 35mm, in a box, and not stored somewhere safely, as one would think. That will be another post, a little bit later.
I decided that first step is first and took the easy, yet very time consuming way to start on these projects...I am organizing my photos on my computer.
  
For a while, I had grouped everything by topic, but then I found, it was getting to be too much for which year, or even which month the pictures were taken in.  I had a bazillion Halloween folders and Easter and Camping (which we do a lot of and you will soon learn that), and so on, and so on.  Now, if you love to take pictures, like I do, and when you have four kids, like we do, and many annual traditions...you see where I'm going with this...well you will find that, that does NOT work out very well.  We had a least 7 folders titled "3 Rivers Camping", but no year attached to it; and since we go camping to 3 Rivers at least three times every summer, it was getting smooshed together for which trip was which.

About a year ago our computer crashed.  It crashed hard.  When I brought it to my trusty computer guy, he was so kind to return it, with, just my external hard drive.   However, Trusty-Computer-Guy, is a friend of ours and I have scrapbooked with his wife in the past and with him knowing the importance of salvaging my photos, he was able to save ALL of my digital photos.  LOVE HIM!  I cannot stress to you enough the importance of backing up your hard drive AND putting it on an external hard drive as well.  I stress this, because it's not the first time Trusty-Computer-Guy has bailed me out, and it's not the first time I've received his lecture about backing up my files.   However, this time, it was duly noted, and action was taken.  I got very lucky.  Very, very lucky.

So, our digital photo storage starts around 2004/2005.  For the last 8 years I've just been uploading the photos and saying, "I'll organize later".  Famous last words, right?  Well, today is LATER.  One of my favorite features of our digital cameras is the date stamp.  When you upload it has a date stamp so you know when that picture was actually taken.

I have been organizing all of the photos by year, and then by event.   This is going to make all my scrapbooking so much more efficient.  I can't wait to be able to get the photos printed and get back to my hobby.  Now, what started as a rainy day afternoon project has taken on a life of it's own.

Here is a great link that also explains how she organized her digital photos and backed them up.

http://www.lilblueboo.com/2012/11/how-to-organize-and-print-years-worth-of-photos.html

Now, I just have to work on my room......I have such big plans for my craft room!  I can't wait for you to see them!


How do you organize your digital photos?   Do you back them up to an external hard drive like we do or do you use an outside service?  How are you 35mm photos organized?  Do you scan them onto your hard drive as well?  How many of you are scrapbookers?  How are your photos organized?

Comments

  1. When ever we download our pics from our camera I create a file. Mine are all broken down by year and sub filed by month and event.It has made my life easier. We have made a gew CD's.....but needless have not done much more than that. We have a tower that crashed and we need to look into if we can save the files but we think it's a battery issue and just haven't had the time to focus on it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's my next step is to put everything onto CD's.

    ReplyDelete

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