We are in a new age of photos! We can take photos of everything at any time. What that leaves us with are a LOT of photos. The problem with this is we have not yet figured how we as a people will deal with all of the photos. This is a new problem. In past generations, photos were few and precious. They were special, they were shared, and they were not difficult to organize.

How to start:
1. Get all of your photos to one place. One larger external hard drive and start uploading them.

2. When doing #1, you need to look in all the places you have photos. Online places like Google photos, phones, phone services, computers, old computers, flash drives. There are tons of places photos can hide.

3. One other problem that happens is duplicates. The photos on the old computer were backed up to the new computer (or were they, we are never sure are we!). For this, we use software that can deduplicate. Duplicate cleaner pro and Awesome Duplicate photo finder are two we have used. There is a small fee and a lot of time involved in this process. We also suggest doing the process more than once. If there are multiple copies of one picture, it may take a few swipes through the software.

4. We suggest making folders for each year. Look at the photo files in “detail” view. It gives you the option to see when the photo was taken so you can put them in the correct folder by year.

5. So you have all your photos on one hard drive. They have been de-duplicated and are in folders by year. Make multiple copies of your new photo files. One online in a paid cloud service (unpaid ones compress your photos and mine your photos so they can sell you things, you are the product which is why you don’t have to pay). One copy on the hard drive and one more copy on a computer, another external hard drive, etc. You want three copies with one being off-site in case of a disaster.

6. Last but not least you need to update your saved photo library monthly. Adding new photos and putting them in all of your three places. This is the part that is the hardest — making a new habit like changing your furnace filters or giving your dogs their flea medication. You can do those things you can do this to!