My Photo Organization and Backup Process

I treasure pictures so creating backup copies is a priority. Redundancy is good in this case and I don't delete pictures from the camera memory card unless they're saved in two locations. I still have CDs of old pictures but we know this format is on the way out. My office laptop does not even have a CD drive so it's time to move to the cloud. I used to have a pro account on Flickr for this purpose but the old process was too cumbersome. You had to manually drag and drop the folders into the site and it took too long to process. Now there's a Flickr Uploadr that can run in the background and more importantly, 1 TB of free storage. I already have 50k+ backed up, 24k+ to go... and counting.

With so many pictures, organization is important. There are many ways to go about it but what works for me is organizing by date. I have folders by year, subfolders by month then sub-subfolders by date/event. I used to not have the year on the lowest level but Flickr does not recreate the hierarchy so it's hard to tell from which year the album was.

C: Drive

I use Picasa as viewer and editor because it copies the folder structure on the drive and anything done on Picasa is also synced to the drive (e.g. delete, rename, copy). I can also easily upload pictures from Picasa to Google Photos for use on this blog.

Picasa

The 75k pictures go back 15+ years but I admit they're not all good and I should have deleted many of them long ago. I'm trying to be more disciplined and intentional at purging new pictures but it's a lot harder for the old albums. I just clean up as I look through them. Work in process.

If you're reading this post, I'm interested to know how you organize and back up your files. Care to share?

Comments

  1. marzSeptember 3, 2015 at 2:49 AM

    Hi Dee, I use Box and 2 hard disks to back up. Organization is also similar with yours - by year, month then events. Picture is downsized using ACDSee. This year I started deleting unwanted shots right after each upload. I agree that cleaning up the past years' albums is a daunting task. 2014 pa lang yung nagawa ko haha I also make it a point to do an annual photobook and even some 4R albums. Medyo old school yes but I love it when the kids reach for the albums and flip through the pages :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. DFSeptember 6, 2015 at 10:40 AM

    Hi Marz! Goal ko din to create a photobook for every year or loose photos in a box to flip through. Yung generation natin grew up with physical albums and it's one of the things I miss.

    ReplyDelete

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