Last night I spent almost two hours organising photos from months 8 – 11 and making photo CDs for the family.
It is exhausting and is probably the least organised part of my life.
I must confess that it was worse when we were taking pics from two cameras.
Now we’ve restricted ourselves to one camera so that at least when I download, it’s all there in one place.
I am so behind with my Project 365 blog, I fear I may never catch up again.
I don’t know how some of you do it – up to date all the time and up on blogs/ Facebook on time, not weeks or months later!
I do know I make too big a thing of it in my head and if I actually just sat down and downloaded and organized and copied to my “to blog” folder (do you have a “to blog” folder?) once a week, it would take 15 – 20 minutes.
But that’s me. I download only every 2 – 3 weeks or so unless I desperately want a pic from the camera.
I keep thinking, “cool, I’m up to date” and then 3 months pass and I’m back to square one.
So this time I want to fix it before it gets to that state again. I’ll have to trick myself and play games with my timer to get me moving.
Please share your tips. Do you live with that cable in your handbag or what?
P.S. I read this FANTASTIC post yesterday – I became a mom and lost myself – go read and no prizes for seeing which comment’s mine! LOL
P.P.S. This is my newest lazy organising trick - photo collages :)
Ok, I have a system that's been working for a while - I make a folder every week with the date of the Sunday as the name of the folder - (say 2010 06 27 for this week). All the pictures taken goes into that folder and as it is numerical it is automatically organized from January to December. . I do not make any other - if I make a file smaller for posting on the blog I save it in the same directory as say Img0045 small etc. If I make a CD I make a temp directory, copy (not move) the pictures there, make CD's and deleted folder.
ReplyDeleteIf we had a big event in the week, say like last week's wedding, I make a separate folder under the date one with the name -say x and x wedding etc.
This way I always know what is on my back-up harddrive because you can immediately spot the numerical order.
My laptop has a card reader so it's easy. I also carry my cord in my camera bag - as I use a SLR it is always a big item in any way.
For the blog: I have a folder that I save each day's picture(s) in. I take 10 minutes every night after they go to bed to take care of it. It's just part of their night time routine at this point.... For facebook: I save pictures in a "for fb" folder. For every day pictures: Once my SD card is full, I transfer the pictures over into folders that have 200 pics each. I have them organized by date and I have them backed up 2 different ways. I'm really bad about printing pics though! I went 5 months without printing pics a couple of months ago... Talk about a pain to organize! :)
ReplyDeletePhoto collages are awesome...not lazy at all! I download every Friday night b/c my life is so interesting and socially packed! I create some blog posts ahead of time so I won't have to worry about it during the week.
ReplyDeleteWhy are you making CDs for family? Why not just put pictures up on a shared site? Just wondering...
Rebecca, my family is more technologically challenged than I am. My MIL told me my blog (not this one, the babies one) takes too long to download (she has dial-up) and that's about how it is....
ReplyDeleteSo to avoid the constant banging of my head against the wall, I make CDs every 3 - 4 months and that makes everyone happy. They know the blog is there but if they have excuses then they will wait until I'm good and ready!
You've seen my Dropshots site. I just drag and drop photos to their little upload doohickey on my desktop and it puts them in order. If I have time I'll edit, and remove the really cruddy photos, but if I don't have time, I'm still getting them to family.
ReplyDeleteI have a system that I set up when the boys were 6 months old.
ReplyDelete* End of each month, download all pics from all cameras (including video camera) and put into one big folder.
* Edit like a mofo. Delete anything that I don't want to keep forever.
* At the end of each month, I end up with 20-100 photos. I burn a DVD of the photos & videos, then copy these to our external hard drive.
* I then take the pictures to be printed. When I get the pictures back, I label the back of each photo with the month and year, then put them in photo boxes in sequential order.
Sounds crazy but if it's not printed, it's something I'm going to keep forever. I'm NEVER going to look through thousands of photos on a hard drive. I take too many. I've already taken 5000 pics on my new camera that I got in December. A lot of those are for other people but a lot of them are for me! So 100 a month seems like a good max.
There seemed to be more photos when they were babies bc they changed so quickly.
Argh...I'm horrible at staying caught up on pictures. I got an external hard drive for Christmas and I downloaded all the pictures from the time the babies were born (that were STILL on my memory card...I'm so thankful I didn't lose them!), but since then, it's only been hit or miss with the downloading. I still have a LOT on memory cards.
ReplyDeleteMy laptop has a card reader, so it's pretty easy to pop it in and pick out a few pictures to add to the blog. (I usually upload to Picnik first to edit, then save to Flickr and add to the blog from there.) Facebook is pretty much the same way...just a few pictures here and there, when I get time. I almost never have pictures printed. I HAVE to start, because there are lots of frames I need to fill!
I am seriously going to work on this very issue in the next month or so. For one, I'm ready to have pictures up around the house...that's my inspiration! : )
I struggle with my whole photo system as well. I have photo's on 3 computers... (Sigh!)
ReplyDeleteI try to keep it filed according to dates. Uhmm, sometimes!
Love the photo collage!
I can take the memory card out of my camera and insert it directly into my computer. So that makes uploading easy. I have a folder for every single day of the year (that I've taken pictures on) and that's how I organize them. I do have them separated by years. In my viewer, I can click the 2010 tab and then everyday comes up below that and I can click really quickly day by day to see the photos inside. I do it so often that I have a general idea where my pictures are. It only takes me a few seconds to find what I'm looking for. When I go to upload them on my blog or on Facebook, I do have to keep changing the folder I'm uploading them from to switch days, but it's not too bad. Otherwise, I just look to see what day the last picture I uploaded was taken on and then I view the folders after that to see which new ones I want to upload.
ReplyDeleteI find Picasa really easy in that it keeps them in date order, but I then tend to sort by month. That's detailed enough for me now. From 0-3 mths I did week by week folders because she changed so quickly.
ReplyDeleteCollages aren't lazy. They're fantastic.