A Bowl Full of Lemons Challenge: Organize your digital photos!

When I read the newest "weekly challenge" at A Bowl Full of Lemons last Sunday morning, my heart sank.


"Organizing your Digital Pictures"

This is a huge, huge task for me. One I have been meaning to get to for a very long time, but haven't. And so, my hard drive has continually been eaten up by photos. It's even worse since I started blogging more often and have been including so many pictures, especially the Kids in my Kitchen pictures. All just taking up space on my hard drive, no order to them at all. Just a big, huge mess.


So when I read the title I thought, "ugh. I just can't."

Then I read the post and the step by step instructions. And I thought "okay...maybe I could do that". And it took me a few evenings, but I did.

I DID IT!!!! This is such a huge feat for me.

I did it exactly the way the post describes.

Before I started, I had miles upon miles upon miles of pictures, sitting in the "My Pictures" folder within "My Documents". There was a folder for every different day I had uploaded pictures, which is what my computer automatically does - organize them by day in which they were uploaded. But when I look at the screen, that tells me nothing...other than I have uploaded a lot of pictures over the last few years.


I went through them, one by one by one, and separated them into years - a folder for 2009, 2010, 2011, etc, and dumped each of the pictures into the correct folder.

2010, 2011

Then, within each year I created monthly folders and separated all the photos from that year into the correct monthly folders.

Here's an "in process" photo of me doing this. I have got the Feb and March folders done, now I'm about to create a folder for April and dump the corresponding pics into that folder, continuing on throughout the year.

Then within each month, I created sub folders, labelled with the event. So from these pictures in
the "January" folder


I further separated them into a "New Year's Eve/Day 2011" folder and a "Stuff to sell" folder.

This is my February 2011 folder. Within it are 8 sub folders : Making snow cones, Making granola bars, Disney on Ice, Jack's birthday, Snowshoeing, Valentine's Day, Ice skating and Misc Pics

I have digital pictures on my computer from 2006 - now. I followed the above described steps for all of those pictures, separating the photos:

• first into yearly folders,
• then in each year I created monthly folders,
• then within each month I sorted them into events/groupings.

So, now, when I open the first "My Pictures" folder within "my Documents", I see this.

Along with my "blog pic" and the "sample pictures" folder (which I have since deleted) there is a "Cheesecake photos" folder, "Pre 2006", "2006", "2007", "2008", "2009, "2010", "2011", and "To be sorted". Those are for the older pics that as I was going through I wasn't exactly sure which year they were taken . I can go back later and sort them out into the correct yearly folder. It also works well for when I am uploading current photos onto my computer - I can put them directly into this file if need be and go back later when I have more time to organize them all.

Also, as I was separating them into their proper folders, I did aloooooooot of deleting. Deleting of photos I just used for blogging and knew I didn't need, duplicate copies of digital photos, poor quality photos, etc etc etc. That was a huge job in itself, but it felt great to get it done.

Here's a shot of my recycle box. There was a lot of room to scroll up and down.

Now for me, the most crucial step was to back all of this up onto Cds or a thumb drive. Jeff bought me both for Christmas, in hopes that I would get some of these photos off of our hard drive. The other thing about me is that I have gotten very lazy about printing photos. As in, I haven't at all, for 2 years or so. I don't really feel a need to have them in photo albums anymore when everyone sees the ones I want them to see on facebook. But, I needed a better way than facebook to back up my photos so I feel great about these Cds and the thumb drive. Facebook is good in case the Cds/thumb drive ever get lost or destroyed, and the Cds/thumb drive is good for reprinting photos. Which I would really like to do. I used to be really good about it when I was scrapbooking. I used to scrapbook all the time and was even a Creative Memories Consultant. Since Jack joined the family though I haven't found much time for scrapbooking. In his baby book I have gotten as far as the day he was born...(He turned 3 last month). I would like to get better at printing these photos and framing some, making little mini albums, etc, but there are at least 2 fukll years worth of photos on here Ineed to print off...feels very overwhelming... that is a whole other project...a whole other challenge... and wouldn't you know it, Toni at A Bowl full of Lemons addressed that back in January...here is a whole system set up to motivate me to tackle organizing my PRINTED photos. Love it.

I cannot tell you how much I love how organized this is now. As I was doing this I came across so many great pics from over the years. I really enjoyed the trips down memory lane. And now, thanks to the way I have labelled all of these folders, it is quite easy for me to locate any of the hundreds of photos I have taken in the last 5 years and I will have a better idea of exactly when they were taken too.

If you are at all confused by the way I did this, read this post - it's exactly what I did. and explains it much better.

This was a project that has been years in the making for me. Thank you Toni, for motivating me to Get.It.Done.