Organizing Digital Photos

Now that Grad Central is closed at my house for at least four more years, and school is officially over for the Summer I am able to chisel away some things that I've had on my to do list for sometime.. One of the biggest things was organizing my digital photos.. I keep getting viruses on my laptop and I'm now worried about losing all my photos that I have stored on here.

Now is the best time to finally get them off and safely stored on CD's and printed and bound into a scrapbook.. I decided to start with the most recent and work my way backwards. This is not for the faint of heart I've been gathering. It's some work but I feel it will be well worth it once it's all done. AND... the best part is I now know how to do this so at the end of June it will be a piece of cake to keep this updated..

So what am I talking about??

Well, I found a really neat system on a Pinterest post awhile back. I'm so sorry that I don't have the original post anymore but if I do find it, I will link back to this one for credit where credit is due! Some of the ideas I've posted were from her blog...

This lovely lady showed me how to take the overwhelming task of sorting all this and making it easy and simple..

First you get an index card like above..  Make five columns like you see..

First column is for the Months

January 2013

Feb

Mar

and so on

This one is for 2013 pictures so we are only to May but previous years will have all 12 months written out.

Second column says Sam's Upload.

This is for downloading all the pictures you are going to keep onto a place you plan to print them. For me it's Sam's Club. Once you have each month's pictures uploaded you will put a checkmark in the appropriate month/column

The next column says HARDCOPY PRINTED

You will put a check mark in this box for each month once you get your pictures printed

Next column says BACK UP CD

You will put a checkmark in this column for each month you print out a hardcopy cd

The last column says PUT IN ALBUM

Once you have all your prints copied and placed in your album/scrapbook you will check this column off

As you can see above I'm moving along quite nicely with the 2013 pictures. Jan-April are uploaded, printed, backup CD made and now they are ready to be placed in an album. So how do I store the photos I've printed until I'm ready to place in an album??

 Like this above. Take a piece of cardstock and fold in half. Staple sides to form a pocket. Label the top with month/year and then list what the contents are inside as you can see above that I did for Jan-April 2013

You can see above how the photos sized 4 x 6 fit nicely in the cardstock pocket

I then took it a step further and made label covers for all my CD's. I already had a label maker but you can easily buy CD label stickers at Walmart and follow the directions on their website to print them out.. I just wrote the month/year and in the black section, I wrote the basic contents of each CD so when I look at the cover I know what it has on it before I ever put it in the computer for upload..

I absolutely LOVE this and can't wait to get it all done for all the years of photos I have on my computer. The most time consuming has been going through all my photos. I've had to ditch quite a bit because I really don't need 5 photos of the same thing, and deleted blurry photos etc..

Now that I'm trying to work to get them all on CD's and off my computer, I needed a place to store the photos I've recently got printed. I have a photo storage box and have placed the CD in front of the cardstock pocket with the photos inside in chronological order until I can get to them and place them in albums..

So this is my week's task here at my house.. It feels so good to get organized and can't wait to see them all in albums when I'm all said and done.. I have pictures from 2008 to current on my computer so it's going to be a busy week....