Spoiler alert! It’s beyond simple!
I have one hub where all of my pictures live. Yes. ALL. The old print photographs. My phone pictures. Even pictures that date back to before I was born. That method allows me to easily find any photographs from my own college graduation back in 1997 to Easter 2017!
It’s this desktop external hard drive:
I have all of my pictures saved on that hard drive and organized in folders by year and then within every year folder is folders labeled by month.
Getting the pictures into that system takes a little effort but once the initial work is done and a routine is in place it’s pretty easy to maintain!
I always suggest starting with the pictures that are on your phone. I suggest having a daily automatic back up to a place like Amazon Photos first. Then start a monthly routine of also saving them to an external hard drive. It’s a pretty easy task when you just take a few minutes every month to do that. It also means your pictures are easily placed into the year and month folder where they belong!
When it comes to old print photographs, once you have a digital copy of each you can also place those into the year and month that they were taken. Using a scanner like the Epson FastFoto or the Photomyne app you can easily get those digital copies.
Pictures dating back to my own childhood were pretty limited. If you are going back to times when very few pictures were taken too, it may not be necessary to put the pictures into monthly folders. Often that specific date isn’t even known when we start going back decades ago. Don’t let the little details slow up your process. It’s better to be close on the date than to let the frustration of figuring out exact chronological order halt the project.
That is my simple organizing method that makes it easy for me to locate things like that old Easter photo or my nieces newborn photos.
This old cousin photo will be so fun to share this Easter! And that babe on the right is heading off to high school next year. I love that I can easily pull these pictures out to share!
There you have it. My simple, yet super effective, way to keep all of my photographs organized!
If you are looking for more tips to give your pictures the love they deserve follow along on YouTube and Instagram. I’ll be sharing my best methods to keep your pictures organized!