How to Organize your Family Photos

Anyone else have terrible anxiety thinking about the amount of unorganized photos you have? Let me give you some tips and tricks to show you how to organize your family photos!

Trust me, I understand the headache. I’ve finally worked out a system now that works fairly well for me. I hope it helps you out as well!

I don’t want my families memories living forever as jpgs on a hard drive or just up in the cloud 🌨

One main location

First off, you need to move all of your photos to one central place. That means getting them all off of your devices! First, I import the photos from my phone, my husbands phone and my camera and dump them all into a folder on my laptop. Then I name the folder “Family Photos” or something similar.

Organize Chronologically

Once you’ve got your folder with thousands of photos, it’s time to start organizing them. Arrange your folder so that the images are sorted by DATE. Then have your folder layout set to “DETAILS” so that you can see the dates of the photos more easily.

Then I create a folder for each YEAR and then break it down further by MONTH.

Cull, cull and keep culling

Now if you’re not a photographer, you may not know what this is. This is the most time-consuming part, but it is important! Just because we CAN take thousands of photos of our kids, doesn’t mean we need to keep them all. If you can keep on top of deleting your photos as you go (which I need to get better at myself), it can significantly reduce the overwhelm when you get to this step.

If you’re like me, you probably take multiple photos of the one moment as you’re trying to capture the perfect shot. You need to be a little bit ruthless here and DELETE double ups/blurry photos/ones where people’s eyes are closed, etc. Don’t just leave them in your photo library clogging up space and overwhelming you!

Set small goals

Remind yourself that you don’t have to get everything done at once! I am going to set myself up for a weekly challenge. My goals is going to be to cull and edit (if necessary) a months’ worth of personal photos. It’s amazing how much progress you will make if you just get this started!

Back them up

If you ONLY have your photos stored in one location, you are sadly setting yourself up for heartbreak here. I know that you and I have heard stories of computers failing, phones being lost or stolen, etc. I like to use the 3 2 1 rule, which means you need 3 copies of your photos. Two copies on different storage types (like an external hardrive + your laptop) + One copy offsite (like the cloud).

Make a habit of it

Each week, try to scroll through your photos on your phone and delete the obvious non-keepers out of your library right away. Then, set a monthly reminder to import, cull and back up the previous months’ worth of photos. If you do it in small bursts, it takes so much less time and so much less overwhelming. Do I do it every month? I wish I did but I fall behind too! However it’s about having the systems in place so that you can easily catch up when you can!

I really hope this has helped you learn how to organize your family photos! Or at least feel like you can at least get started. Once it a point to get started on doing this, you won’t regret it! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

If you are in Nashville, TN Pensacola, FL or Greenville, SC and would like to book a session, I would love to have you! Take a look at my packages here or connect with me here. Looking forward to hearing from you! 🙂