If you are anything like me you have hundreds, if not thousands, of photos sitting on your hard drive waiting to be scrapbooked. I have put together some tips that help me organize and find my photos when I need them. If you take about 30 minutes each month to organize your photos you will save yourself a lot of time and energy later.
I have these tips set up in steps, the more steps you follow the more organized your photos will be!
Set the correct date on your camera – If you have a date stamp on your photo files it will be easier to find what you are looking for when it comes time to scrapbook the event. Make sure the correct date is set on your camera and it will help you organize them later if you don't follow the next few steps!
Download your photos to your computer at least once per month – I try to download my photos monthly. The last day of each month download your photos onto your computer. Make a folder with the current date (January 2016) and load all your photos into the file, if there are photos from the previous month cut and copy them to your December 2015 folder.
If you scrapbook by month this is all the organization you need, if you scrapbook by event the next tip will help you even more.
Organize your monthly folders into categories – Create categories/folders for the different events you took photos for. For example:
Zander 9th Birthday
Amanda Band Concert
Trip to Space Center
Nature Photos
Family Photos
School Photos
Drag the photos into the appropriate folder and you have them organized for when you decide to scrapbook. Instead of having to wade through every photo you took that month you have the specific ones you need ready to go.
Delete the bad photos – It took me awhile to be able to do this. For some reason I thought I may actually use that photo where everyone has their eyes closed but after many years of never using them I have learned to delete them. If you have multiple shots of an event go through each one and delete the bad photos, the ones where people have their eyes closed or are blurry. If you open the photo and think “ugh that wasn't a great shot” then it's probably a sign that you should delete it. Of course there are exceptions – there have been times when the only photo I have to document an event is a bad one so I keep it.
Pick out your favorite photos – You have your photos sorted by month and theme, now pick out the ones you want to put on a page. Create a “Scrapbook These” folder and move the photos you definitely want into it. If you need filler photos you can go into the general photo and pick more out, but for now you have the ones you for sure want on your page or at least the ones you want as the main focus.
Back up your photos – Nobody thinks it will happen to them until it does. Back up your photos, purchase an external hard drive (EHD) or online cloud service and each month as you download your photos into the monthly file copy and paste it onto your EHD as well. Anyone who has lost their photos will tell you not to wait. Do it now! Losing photos can be costly to recover and sometime they cannot be recovered at all.
Now your photos are ready to scrapbook. When you see a kit you love or inspiration hits all you need to do is find the topic file you want and your photos are ready to go.
Barb, Albums to Remember Designs
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