A Guide to Organizing Your Digital Photos

Organizing photos can be a daunting project, even for a seasoned minimalist! In this Minima Journal, I’m going to share my best practices for organizing digital photos, including tips for scanning physical photos. If you have a combination of printed and digital photos to organize, I recommend starting with our post “A Guide to Organizing Your Printed Photos”.

I also advise against starting with photos in terms of overall home organization. It’s best to tackle everyday spaces first, such as the kitchen or clothing closet. Doing so will create the physical and mental space to focus on photos. I advise the same approach when organizing paperwork.

ESTABLISH YOUR END GOAL

In the age of digital photos, it can feel overwhelming to even begin a project of this scale. Whenever I work with clients, I always ask what the end goal or vision is. With digital photos, do you simply want photos consolidated to one location, or do you need to clear valuable smartphone/computer storage space? Do you eventually want to create a few printed albums from your digital photos? It may be helpful to start small. Perhaps you set an initial goal to consolidate all photos. Once that step is complete, you may feel empowered to go further.

Create a storage plan

Before you dive into too much detail sorting and deleting, I recommend taking stock of your digital photos so you can have a clear sense of your collection. Create a simple list of where they are all stored: Google Drive, Apple iCloud, miscellaneous folders on the computer, an external hard drive, etc. Perhaps your photos are already consolidated in one location such as iCloud. If so, well done! You’re ahead of most people.

It’s almost always best to keep digital photos in one location (preferably cloud storage so you can access them from anywhere), but there are always exceptions to the rule. Decide what works best for you and be consistent. For example, I keep most of my digital photos stored in iCloud, but photos for Minima’s website and marketing materials are organized on Google Drive with the rest of Minima’s files. It made sense for me to keep business and personal separate, even though there is some overlap. Another example is my client who is a professional photographer. She keeps her professional photos on external hard drives and her personal/everyday photos in iCloud.

For tips on how to import photos into iCloud, Google Photos, or other cloud storage, I recommend consulting their websites for detailed instructions. If the metadata (date, time, location) of an imported photo is incorrect, you are able to edit it so that all of the photos show up in the right order.

IDENTIFY PHOTOS TO delete

Be ruthless when it comes to deleting digital photos. Think of the older generations before digital cameras existed—they did just fine having only a few photos to capture each season. Just because we can document everything doesn’t mean we should. Your digital photo collection will continue to grow as time passes and there is simply no way you’re going to have the time to go back and look at all of them again. Some photos are more important than others—keep the best ones and let the rest go.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, I recommend minimizing any photos that are blurry or over/underexposed. Let go of photos with people you don’t know or remember, or of occasions you don’t feel need to be documented. If a photo brings back a bad memory, let it go. Storing photos can become costly, so only keep those that matter to you or your family. Most importantly—don’t stress. Photos can be a nice record of our lives, but living in the present moment is more important than clinging to the past.

Scan any printed photos

If you have printed photos, now is a good time to scan them and incorporate them with your digital photos if you’d like. You can do this yourself, but if you have a larger collection I recommend hiring a professional. Scanning will cost you either time or money, so it can be a big motivator to do a second pass to see if there are additional photos you can discard.

If you’re local to Richmond, Virginia where Minima is located, I recommend Revolve. My entire family has used their services to digitize all of our childhood photos and VHS tapes. They do an excellent job at a reasonable price. I preferred a local option versus sending everything to a company through the mail—the risk of damage or loss seemed too high for something so important.

It may feel like you’ll never get through all of your digital photos. I felt that way too, but eventually I completed the task and am now in maintenance mode. Each week, I delete unneeded photos from the past week or so. Instead of scrolling through social media, consider scrolling through your photos and deleting.