Imagine your computer’s hard drive fails, your camera’s memory card gets corrupt or your phone falls into the toilet and you lose ALL your photos, would you:

a)      Feel secure because you have your photos backed up?

b)      Feel sick to your stomach but have a little comfort knowing that you can still go pick up a photo book and look at all your treasured photos?

c)      Just die.

If you answered “A”, job well done! You are probably so organized, you could write this blog post for me. If you aren’t especially organized in this area, I have a few tips to share to protect those invaluable photos. In four simple steps, you can go from unorganized and unprotected to safe and secure.

IDOC (Identify, Determine, Organize and Copy)

Identify where you have pictures - on your camera, on your computer, on your phone or tablet, stored on a website?

Determine which photos you want to keep. With digital cameras it’s not uncommon to set the camera to burst and gather more photos than necessary.  If you have multiple photos of the same subject with slight variances, you may want to pare down your photos to a smaller, more manageable collection of photographs.

Organize the photos that you’ve selected on your computer. Moving forward, this is the easy part. It will take you less than 3 minutes to set up:

Go to your file management system on your computer (My Pictures on your PC)

Create a folder titled 2013 and a series of sub-folders titled Jan 2013, February 2013…Dec 2013

Copy files over from your phone or camera into the folder with the date they were taken.

Batch rename your files. Click on the first image, hold Shift and click on the last image. Right click and select Rename. Title the images with the dates and activity, i.e. 3-24-13EasterBrunchwCrawfords.jpg. Trust me, you won’t miss “DSC-5783″ and renaming helps when searching for a file.

You may also want to create a simple text document for each month or  year that outlines the highlights of the images in the folder(s). That will make it easier when going back to look for images.

To manage your existing photos, this will be the most time-consuming part (depending on how many photos you have) but it will be well worth the effort for accessing the pictures in the future.

Copy your pictures and store them in different places. Store them on different kinds of storage media (CDs, DVDs, USB flash drives, external hard drives, online storage, photo books) and in various geographic locations (i.e. safety deposit box).

If you’d like to take it a step further, put a recurring task in your task manager on your phone or calendar to download and back-up your files on a regular basis (from monthly to bi-annually, depending on how many photos you take).

If you use these simple steps (or are inspired by these steps to create your own management system) to help manage your digital files, it just may save you someday from losing your treasured memories.

Sunday, September 15th, 5:00pm – 7:00pm – Coronado. With the beach and the Hotel Del as a backdrop to your family photo, how can you go wrong with this session? Great for families or for children only. Sorry, pets not allowed on this beach.

Saturday, October 26th, 3:30pm – 5:30pm - Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve. Photos will be set among the natural dry grasses and historical buildings. Style recommendation – romantic, white or off-white natural colors. Great for couples, families and children only. Pets on leashes are allowed at this location.

Sunday, November 17th, 2:15 – 4:15pm - Fallbrook. Photos to be taken on a beautiful private property with a 100 year old red barn as our backdrop.  Great for families and children only.

For pricing information, click here: MiniSessionPricing2013 Print pricing is listed on my website under the 2013 Pricing link on the Information tab.