How To Organize Your Photos

Here is your comprehensive guide for how to organize your photos!

It probably comes as no surprise that I’m very organized. For me, it’s the only way to live. I actually, kinda, sorta love to organize. Having something neat, clean, orderly, and looking pretty allows me to take a deep breath & breathe easily. Photos are not an exception to this. For a while, my photos were a hot mess because I just didn’t have a good system at all. Well…I’ve turned that around & got it all figured out for digital AND printed photos and I’m sharing all of that with you today.

It has taken me quite a while to figure out the best way for me to organize my photos. And let me tell you that I have done all it wrong before. 

If I could go back & talk to my younger self, one of the things I’d tell her is to organize her photos better & with some dates included. I get frustrated with myself when I’m looking for old photos or I come across old photos & they’re lacking a date because then I have NO idea when they were taken.

Thankfully, my mom can usually tell me how old I was in the photo so I have a general idea of when it was taken but without her, I’d be in trouble. Yay mom! (She made me say that. Haha)

Flashback to a couple of months ago when I came across a bunch of random flash drives & discovered that most were full of photos. Photos that weren’t organized and lacking dates. *sigh…*

Off I went to turn that around & get ALL of my pictures organized.

How-To Organize Digital Photos

If you’re storing the photos as soon as you’re taking them:

My suggestion here is to start with one folder labelled for the year. As you’re taking photos off your camera or if you’re downloading them from your iCloud, create a new folder with the date they were taken & the event/person. Look at the image below for what I’m talking about.

Next, I’d go ahead and go through the photos you took & delete the ones that are an obvious “no”. It’ll save you space on your computer & time later. My advice would be to label each of the photos or at least a variety of them so the people you have photos of are identified at least once. Trust me…future generations will appreciate you. If you aren’t concerned at all with people in your future looking back at your old photos, then don’t bother labeling them. 🙂

If you’re organizing photos on your phone:

Make folders for each event. So if you take photos at your sister’s birthday party on your phone, create an album with the title & date & put all of those photos in there. If you have photos from your kid’s sports game or your living room makeover or your fun vacation, do the same thing.

If you already have a bunch of digital photos in one place:

Start by creating a main folder for the year. Inside that folder, create another folder with the date & a name of what you know you have photos of from that year. Start dragging & dropping photos into the folders & creating new folders & dragging and dropping as you identify them. The image above shows what my main folder looks like.

If you can, rename each photo with who is in them & ages, especially if they’re young kids (you always want to know the ages of the little ones when you’re looking back at those photos). I learned from my family photo scanning project (link!) last year that identifying the people in the photos is important for future generations.

Let’s Talk about Printed Photos!

When I organized all of the printed photos that my family & I found at my grandparent’s house, I decided to break them up in 2 main ways: by specific event (Christmas, Easter, Birthday Party) and by nuclear family (a couple & their dependent children).  There were also categories for each of my grandparents & their families, cross nuclear families (photos of my cousins & I would go in this category) as well as the original nuclear Moore family (my grandparents & their kids). As I went through all of the photos, they went into whichever stack they belonged in.

For you, it may be a little different if they’re just your own family’s printed photos. I would suggest organizing by event first and then by year/age or by person, whichever one makes sense for you. It’ll depend on how many photos you have. For my immediate family, I’d try to do it by year and then whatever I couldn’t narrow down to a year/age, I would have a stack for each individual person.

How to Store Printed Photos:

It’s important to store photos in the right environment so that they last for many many years. The keys to storing family photos are in a climate-controlled (room temperature), well-ventilated room, a dark space, off the floors, in photo-safe boxes and sheet protectors that are used for archival purposes and are acid-free.

I used two different types of boxes. One was a generic scrapbook box that I used to hold photos that were bigger than a 4×6. All of the photos went into sheet protectors & were labeled by what photos are in there. I labelled the sheet protectors based on what was in there. For example, if it was the “original” Moore family (my grandparents, dad, aunts & uncles), then I labeled it “Nuclear Moore Family”. If it featured one of the kid’s family’s, then it was labelled “Family—Kid’s Name”. If it was of an event, then it was labelled with the event name.

The second box has individual boxes inside of it that can hold photos 4×6 or smaller. I also labelled these with what was inside using the same system as I did for the other box.

Storing them in this way not only keeps them organized and allows you to find photos easily but they are also safe for photos and will keep them safe for years to come.

How I Labeled the Actual Photos:

Part of storing family photos is labeling them so future generations can know who is in what photos. For the older photos, the best way I found was to write the names & dates on a sheet of paper, cut it out to fit the text, and then use Scotch tape to tape it to the back of the photo.  For newer photos, I lightly wrote on the back of the photo and covered the writing with Scotch tape to protect it.

So there you have it: your guide to organizing your photos! Hopefully this gave you the guidance you need to get all of your photos organized & to keep all of your future photos organized. In an upcoming blog, I’m going to share how to put a family yearbook together so your photos and yearly memories are preserved forever.

If you have any questions, comment below. Are your family photos organized or do they need to be? Let me know below.

Love,

If you want to read about my entire family photo scanning project, click here and here.