I have spent all my spare time this week trying to organize our family photos.  No, I am not taking about the actually hard copies–they still sit in boxes in our basement.  They have been there since we moved to our house here in Colts Neck, 5 years ago.  That is a project for another day. Instead I have spent all this week trying to organize our digital photos.  All the photos we have accumulated since buying our first digital camera when our oldest was about 5 years old–that is almost 10 years of photographs that have been transferred to CDs, USB drives, online storage, from computer to computer sitting there waiting to be enjoyed.

I love my digital camera and my iPhone camera and I although I am not a “photo” person, I have accumulated almost 5000 digital photos (don’t be too impressed this number includes lots of duplicates and photos that need to be deleted)–the big question is what to do with them.  I am not a scrapbooker and although I would love to make some albums on Snapfish–let’s face it–I will never get around to it and if I did they would probably end up in those boxes in the basement.

Now, don’t get me wrong–I LOVE looking at photos but there has to be a better way to organize them.

Some suggestions for digital photos:

1) BACK UP and then BACK UP again; always have copies of all your photos/albums (I lost a laptop hard drive once and my biggest concern was the photos; thankfully I could restart the device is safe mode to retrieve all the photos)

2) Look into online storage; this can also serve as your back up

3) Find a way to organize and take the time to do it (I am using Photoshop)

4) A friend suggested making an album a year on sites like Snapfish and I thought this was a nice compromise especially if you have little ones–it forces you to weed through all the photos and pick your favorites

5) Delete those awful photos–you know the ones you would never want anyone to see, the ones with your finger in the view finder, eyes closed, unflattering by anyones standards–let’s face it you will never print them out and they are just taking space.

Do you have any other suggestions? I would love to hear them.

On a parting note, I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed looking at each and everyone of these photos.  The memories each photo brings me is priceless.  So although I may not know what to do with my digital photographs or how to keep them organized, I do know that I am going to try to take as many photos of my kids growing up as I can because let’s face it, my memory sucks already so I can’t imagine what it will be like in 20+ years.