It was important to me to be able to use and access my photos without having to re-download them onto my computer. Using an External Hard Drive to Organize Photos

There wasn’t enough space on my computer to store everything. But between my family photos and my blog photos, I had a TON. Ideally, I would have loved to bring all of my photos over to my laptop and organized them there. This helped me get an idea of everything that needed to be organized. Just like I like to take everything out of a space whenever I’m organizing physical items to see what I’m working with, I wanted to bring all of my photos together to one place. This is how I ended up organizing my family photo files– by year and then by month and event. (Think: those photos I whip out my phone to take whenever my kids are being cute!) I also wanted to have access to a collection of candid photos that represent our day-to-day life. I decided that I wanted to be able to easily look back on the major events of each year.

What was my ultimate goal? The way I wanted to be able to use my family photos in the future would determine how I would organize them. When it came to organizing my family photos, I had to begin with the end in mind. These are pictures of Donnie and I and our friends and family members from childhood all the way up through present day.įor the purpose of this post, I am going to focus on organizing the family photos, since those are what I think most people are working with. Then I also had a bunch of digital family photos.

I have a ton of house photos from 7+ years of blogging that I wanted to organize in a way that made them easier to find. My situation was a little bit unique in that I had two different types of photos that I wanted to organize.

On my laptop (in lots of different folders).

Step 1- Make a plan.īefore I could just dive into a project like this one, I felt like I had to wrap my mind around it! I have a ton of digital photos and they were all over the place. If you are looking for ways to speed up your digital photo organizing process, I highly recommend Backup Bootcamp. Her course had many genius shortcuts that made the process go a lot faster.īecause I don’t want to steal her information, I won’t be sharing her shortcuts in this post, but I will let you know the steps in which she has shortcuts available. Part of the way through organizing my photos, I decided to purchase the Backup Bootcamp course from Miss Freddy to help me.

For more information, see my disclosures here. I wanted to share the basic process I went through to get all of my photos organized in case anyone else was having the same photo struggle I was! It takes work to get everything sorted out, but it is possible and so worth it in the end. I never took the time to sit down and do the work to make it happen because I knew it would take a while and wouldn’t be a quick and easy fix.īut now that I have a collection of photos that is not only organized but also backed up and safe, I’m so glad that I took the time to do the work. Organizing my digital photos has been on my to-do list for years now. Give me a messy, cluttered office or garage or closet, and I will probably squeal with glee and get right to work sorting, purging, and organizing.īut when it comes to organizing my digital clutter, I feel much less qualified.

Google photos takeout organizer