If you’ve been reading this series, you’ve made great progress! You put all your photos in one place by going through your group texts, your Photos folder on your phone, and all the scattered images on your computer. You have selected a way to consolidate them via Google Photos, Apple Photos, or Lightroom [read that post here]. You’ve also backed up your photos [blog post here].
Now it’s time to organize all these photos!
Many experts suggest you first organize them by year, then month, then date. That way, you know they are in order. I, however, choose to organize them by year first, then I separate my business images from personal. At that point, I organize by event. If you look above at the image, you’ll see, under 2017 Personal Images, that I’ve listed Door County, Homecoming, etc etc. Usually when I use an SLR camera for personal images, they are specific events.
Sometimes I just have one or two images that don’t really require their own category. So every “season” I add a folder entitled “Summer 2017 Misc” for example. I put all my odds and ends in that folder.
I also have a folder named “IPhone Images” which is where I dump all my phone images. If you really only have pictures from your phone, you don’t really need to add that extra folder. My ultimate goal is to take all the iPhone images and move them up into folders under my main categories. Here is an example on how I’d do that: In my 2017 Personal Folder, there is a folder entitled, “Door County with Julie” inside of that. Since I brought my big camera on that trip, I have those images, but I will also add a sub-folder with iPhone images from that same trip. That way, they are all in one folder and I can easily find them all when searching. However, until I do that project, all my uncategorized iPhone photos stay in that iPhone folder.
Go through all your images that you’ve put in one place and come up with folders that make sense to you. This may be the months you took them, or events or other categories. Whatever makes sense to you, as you want to be able to find them when you’re looking for something!
