Digital Photo Organization: My Monthly Routine

If I were to ask you how many photos you have on your camera reel, what would be your answer? Truthfully?

Now excluding photos you’ve taken with your cell phone camera, how many are screenshots? what about duplicates or blurry photos? And let’s not forget what happens when a child takes your phone and you find this?

I’ve always been pretty good at backing up my photos and keeping them organized, but I became pretty strict about it after losing a few months worth of my first born’s baby videos. It’s been 8 years since then but I still get sad thinking about it. Never again.

So let’s dive in.

• Connect your phone to your laptop and copy everything off.

• Create folders. I usually create a folder for each year, and then use subfolders for each month. If there was an event or trip where I took more pictures than usual, a new subfolder would be created.

Yearly view

Monthly subfolders

• Every month I then empty out my phone. It may take longer if you haven’t been doing this regularly. I go through each picture, deleting screenshots, duplicates, and those images not worth saving. If this is the first time you’re organizing your photos, I’d recommend starting from today’s pictures and get into a monthly habit moving forward otherwise it may be too overwhelming.

• Copy the pictures in their correct folder.

• I prefer the layout of google drive, but you can also use google photos as a cloud backup. I also have an external hard drive where I make a second backup.

• Delete off your phone.

Bonus points if you’re already going through each image, save your favourites in a separate folder. If you’re like me and you make yearly photobooks, half your work in choosing images will already be done.