Parental Arts
How to (Finally) Organize Your Family’s Photos
With a quality camera in your pocket at all times, and kids who do adorable things constantly, it’s easy to suddenly feel like you have way too many pictures to even appreciate them. The prospect of organizing them all (and maybe, possibly, actually making those photo books you’ve always wanted!) can seem overwhelming… and so they stay locked in your phone. But with a little strategizing, you can get your photo collection organized—and maybe even print a few of those books, too.
- Written By
- Marnie Schwartz
Gather All Your Images
For most of us, the majority of our pictures are on our phones, or maybe computers. But what about that old laptop in the closet, or your partner’s phone, or the memory card for the DSLR you use on special occasions? Before you do anything else, pull everything you’ve got into one central, digital location. And don’t forget printed photos, like school pictures or prints people have given you. You’ll want to scan these so they fit into your collection seamlessly.
Back Everything Up
Imagine if you lost your phone or your laptop just suddenly died—and the photos of your babies coming home from the hospital or eating their first bites of solid food just vanished. Instead of relying on yourself to back everything up manually every week or month, set up a system that works on its own. Pay for the extra iCloud space and set it to back up your Apple Photos automatically, use the Google Photos app on your phone, or set up Backblaze, which will save everything on your Mac of PC (photos included) to the cloud for $6 a month. Your photos should live in two, or ideally even three, locations, including something physical like an external hard drive.
Sort Your Pics
Don’t drive yourself crazy making a separate folder for each holiday, birthday, or trip: One for each year, divided into folders for each month, works fine. If you use an app like Google Photos or Apple Photos, it’ll already have done some of this for you. As you go through your pictures, mark your favorites and delete duplicates and junk. An easy way to do this is to just mark all your favorite photos and then go through and delete anything that isn’t starred or favorited. (If you can’t bear to part with any photos, delete stuff like screenshots and blurry pictures, and then pull anything that isn’t your favorite into a separate folder.)
Print Those Books!
Once your photos are out of the cloud and into your hands, you’ll love looking through them—and so will your kids. Chatbooks allows to pull straight from Google Photos or even social media accounts and print up high-quality, inexpensive books easily. You can even connect it to your Instagram account and have it automatically print up and send you a new book with every 60 photos you post. Mixbook offers tons of customization options. And for a truly luxe book, try Artifact Uprising.
Put Them On Display
While you’re ordering books, pick a few favorites to have printed in larger sizes so you can frame them. Or, check out Framebridge, which allows you to upload a photo and have it custom framed and shipped to you. Fracture prints your images directly on glass and turns them into gorgeous, frameless works of art. And Mixtiles makes designing a gallery wall super simple, with 11x11 “tiles” that print straight from your Instagram or camera roll and that you can easily move around.