You ought to be in Pictures

I have received probably 10 emails recently asking me how I organize pictures.  

Which is so funny to me because I'm probably the LEAST organized person on the planet and Scott would tell you that is the TRUTH.  But he is SUPER organized so thankfully I have him because I lose something daily and I would make a mess of our pictures without him.  I also would probably still use a film camera and a flip phone.  

I get asked a lot also about what camera we use.  We have a Canon 6D and I love it. I've finally learned to shoot pictures with a manual setting instead of automatic and I can tell a huge difference.  I have no idea what I'm doing but I'm working on it.  ha! 

I've also learned that lighting is everything. 

I think the reason people always want to know how I organize pictures is because I'm always making collages of past pictures - as in pictures all taken at the same time every year and you wonder how I find them quickly.  So I'm going to show you what we do and I hope it helps. 

We use Lightroom to edit and store our pictures.  It's very easy to use in my opinion (and I'm the least techy person on the planet I promise you.)

This is where I need to say that Scott backs up all of our pictures on an external hard drive and he also stores them with an online company.  (We do NOT want to lose our pictures.) :-)

So we have a folder for each year and inside is a folder for each month and inside that is a folder for each day.  As we import pictures - they go into the correct date folder.  That makes it very easy to look back and find monthly baby pictures or birthday pictures or holiday pictures since I have an idea of the date.  Or first day of school pictures.  Anything associated with a date is very simple to find this way.  It also just keeps them very organized.

Another thing that we do when we import the pictures (and Scott will tell you I'm terrible at this but I'm trying to remember to do it) is to use keywords. If it's pictures of a specific child or an event or whatever - we can use key words and then you can use that keyword to find any picture that applies.  For instance if we used "Nonny" (as in my mom) - I could easily find every picture we have of my mom (IF I have tagged them - which once again I stink at remembering but it makes life easier if I would do it).

As far as creating collages - my favorite site is picmonkey.com.  You can add wording like the above pictures and create easy collages.  On my phone I use an app called Instant pic frames but now IG will create a collage for you - have you figured that out? I love when they added that feature.

We also try to download all of the pictures off of our phones periodically and load them into lightroom as well.  That cleans off storage on our phones and makes sure we have all pictures stored in one spot.  (I usually have to delete about 60% of those before I import them permanently because we tend to take a lot of junk pictures with our phones that I don't really need to keep forever - such as pictures of shopkins bandaids that I put on IG today but don't really need to preserve that memory.)

Do y'all have any more questions - I will answer in comments or update this post.  Please share how you store/save pictures or what methods or sites you like.  We can all learn from each other.

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