Are you ready for week 3 of our organize your photo life series?  Have you kept up with the last two weeks if not, you can find them below.

If you missed week 1 you can find it here

If you missed week 2 you can find it here

This week we are talking about using that system you created last week and importing your photos into software to easily backup and then print your images.

If you already have a software you use, that is great, keep on using that! Or if you want to search your phone, the key components to think about is you want to easily access your images, keep them as high resolution, and be able to edit, and print your work.

Once you have your system down for how you want to organize and store your images, we will then get into sorting, and editing your images(week 4).

Now these methods are not a fail safe.  You should have multiple versions of your photos on different devices(more on this at the end) but these softwares are a good place to start. 

     Photos-This is a great free option if you are primarily using a mac computer or have an iphone.  It is free and comes already installed.  You can quickly and easily download your images from all different devices(phones, tablets, camera cards) and keep them organized into albums.  It even lets you tag images with a function called “faces” and will automatically recognize those who you have imported and tagged in the past. This is helpful if you want to organize your images by family member, or just “kids”

    You can also quickly edit your images in photos as well.  They have an auto enhance feature, as well as filters and manual adjustments like lighten or darken an image and even making it black and white.

    And if you are big iPhone user and take most of your images on your smartphone, then photos will automatically sync your photos from your phone if you use ‘icloud’ and they just show up the next time you open Photos. Talk about easy peasy.

    Google Photos-This is a really great option if you already use Gmail and love google drive.  Google photos lets you upload your images, organize them, and even edit.  You can download an app on your phone and upload your images automatically from that.  The one downfall I found was that I had to choose the option to do a lower resolution option of my phone images to have unlimited free storage space, or I could use the same resolution as it was taken at and risk running out of storage and having to pay for more.  (I did not look into price on this, it was just a feature I noticed when I first started downloading into google photos.

    Your Camera Software-Many people don’t realize but most of your point and shoot cameras, and consumer SLR’s(and even our professional versions) all come with software from the camera company.  If you don’t want to rely on “the cloud” or internet, or one of the above softwares to store your photos, I would look into this software and then back up your images on your computer and another hard drive.  

    A Printing Company(Mpix or Shutterfly)-The other option is to just upload to a printing company and have them stored there.  Now I wouldn’t use this as your sole option for storing your images, however it isn’t a bad one to have access to print your images whenever you need.  I highly recommend the company Mpix first, over the other online retailers. I choose them because they are the sister company to my professional lab and I know you are going to get a great quality.  I have tried other online retailers, and quick cheap printers, but unfortunately those products and prints will not last long. They are not made with archival ink or archival paper, so the chances of them lasting another 50 years is slim.  That is why I choose Mpix.  You can make a free account, and upload your photos from there into different albums. 

    I also use Shutterfly because I have been uploading images to them since college and thankfully they are still there.  I just notice a quality difference in printing at times, and they sometimes will auto crop your images not how you want them, or print them with a weird color cast then what is originally taken with.  But for phone photos or snap shots I do not think it's a bad option. 

Now, after you have chosen a software, it’s time to choose a backup plan.  Just keeping all of your photos on your device, or on your computer is not a very safe way to store your photos. We have all heard the horror stories, and seen the funny meme's or commercials that talk about this. But it’s a real thing. I have about 300 wedding photos that are on my wedding USB that are corrupt and not usable. As a professional photographer, we take every precaution to make sure our images for our clients are safe, yet with digital it’s not always possible.  Here are my tips on a secure back up plan.  

TIP:(because I just messed this up) Make sure you are getting a hard drive that is formatted for your computer. Either a Windows or a Mac.  Some hard drives can be reformatted to work, but I bought one end of last year and didn't pay attention that it was windows based and I'm having a hard time reformatting it!

1. Store all your files on at least TWO different media forms.  Whether you keep them on your computer, and then back your entire computer to a hard drive.  You want to make sure all of your files are safely on AT LEAST two different forms. Also, hard drives usually only last about 5 years. If you have ones that old, make sure to start backing up the info on those to a new device.

2. Get prints of all the photos you want to save forever.  Digital is not a media form that is meant to last. Just look at those old floppy disks from the 80’s and 90’s.  Oh wait, you can’t, b/c there is no computer within a 20 mile radius of your home that will read them.  The same will become of CD’s, and eventually USB’s.  If you want to preserve it, PRINT IT. I do this with ALL of my photos. I print a 4x6 of every image I have taken that I want to keep, and then the ones I really love, I print for my walls and albums.

3. Have a second back up plan.  Not only do I have hard drives(I have two for each year-one is my main folder, and one is my backup). All of my personal photos are backed up into mpix for access later. I know I will still be able to order prints later if needed, and they are off site so if there were an incident in my home, or a hard drive crashed, I could still get them there.

My Favorite hard drives are Western Digital, or G-Technology although there are a ton of other great ones out there too!

This weeks action plan: Find what software is going to suit you best, and then take last week's assignment(organizing January 2021 and December 2020) and import those photos into there.  Part two of this week's action plan is to properly get a backup system in place for your images. Once you upload your images to your software or cloud, then back them up on a hard drive!  Also, to take it further, you can get some prints made right now of those photos so you have them done.

How are you liking our photo series? Have you gotten to work on your photos? Leave a comment and let us know!