These Are Precious Memories

How well are you taking care of your photo and video memories? Can you easily find a specific photo when you look for it? A consistent and organized back up system is necessary if you have any hopes to be able to locate special memories when the need arises.

It is important for me to say that you should not use social media as a photo backup or storage method. It’s ok to use Facebook as a timeline tool, not as a storage tool. I post certain photos so I have a general timeline of our lives and I can look back on certain memories right on Facebook, but I do not expect those photos will be accessible to me years from now when the next social media site is more popular.

The idea came to me to write my first how-to blog when I made a recognition poster for my son during his Senior year of high school. I have always been a stickler for keeping my photo memories archived well and I was happy to see how simple it was to pull close to 60 photos of him from his 18 years of life so far.

When the school notified the parents that this tradition was something everyone participates in I was initially overwhelmed with the idea of highlighting my son in this way. I wasn’t sure where to start or how I was going to find the photos that I could picture in my mind. Then I reminded myself that I have every digital photo from the last 20 something years organized down to the month they were taken and this would be a piece of cake.

If you’re looking for a way to organize your photos and have years to catch up on, that’s okay. I believe this process that I use will work for you. One thing to note, I use both my phone and laptop for this process and I am an Apple user, so the things I mention may be different for you depending on what devices you use. Hopefully you can take these ideas and build your own solution based on your personal device preferences.

First, set a time each month that you are going to work on backing up your photos. I feel this is important to keep the process from being overwhelming. If you don’t take a lot of photos then maybe every 2-3 months is fine for you. My digital to-do list includes a recurring monthly reminder on the 1st day of the month to ensure I don’t get behind.

Before I deep dive into my detailed photo backup process, I wanted to mention the easiest way to protect your photos with little work. Just for kicks, take a look at your Recents count in your Photo app. It’s normal for me to have 300-500 photos in my recents, but that’s it. If you’re keeping 10,000 photos in your recents then I have the solution for you. If you pay for cloud storage space on your device, I suggest not keeping all your photos on the device but instead on the cloud. If all you do is this and not the additional archive process I outline below, then you are still doing yourself a big favor. Again, these steps are based on using an iPhone, so your process may look different. One issue with this process is that backing up videos isn’t as simple. Videos of a certain size sometimes won’t back up to the cloud, so having a physical backup of these is important.

In your Photo app (iPhone, iPad or computer), create a shared folder with the appropriate name (for this example, let’s use “2024 photos”). I also create folders for the special memories of each kid and the family special moments and put them in folders by their names. As each month ends, drag and drop your photos into the share folder. Bonus points if you share access to the folder with family members, but this is optional. I do this to ensure my kids have their special photos on their phones to look back on. The nice thing about having the photos in a shared folder is that you can delete them from your main photo area and still have access to them when you need it.

Now back to the details of my photo backup that takes your photos from your computer and puts them in an organized library that you can easily go back to. Once you’ve determined when you are going to start the first backup process, expect to spend extra time deciding how you will categorize your photos. I find this an extremely helpful step to ensure your most valued photos are even easier to locate. The categories that I use are:

– Family photo sessions

– School, Sports, Extracurricular professional photos

– Casual / everyday photos

– School artwork photos

Family photo sessions - We do these yearly and I save them separately so they are easy to locate. They are the photos I have framed on the walls at home and in case I need to find the originals I like to have them in their own category.

School, Sports, Extracurricular professional photos - I order at least one print of the school photos that are done professionally. I love to see how the kids grew through school. Our school does Fall and Spring photos. In addition to that; we have a lot of cute professional photos of the kids when they were trying sports out, such as Upward basketball, Soccer shots, etc.  Our oldest daughter has some great photos from her time on the volleyball team both at school and competitively. Our son has some great photos from being in band at school over the years. Our youngest daughter has photos from our competition tumbling and trampoline team.

Casual / everyday photos - These are the photos of us doing life. For me they include school plays, vacations, everyday living, family activities and the random photos that end up making some of the most fun memories.

School artwork photos - This is one I wish I had started 20 years ago when our oldest daughter started attending Mother’s Day Out. There are so many adorable art pieces that come home with the kids over the years but then any attempt to save them ends up getting lost, destroyed or at a minimum just forgotten about. I’d like to expand on how I took on the task of digitizing the school memories for my kids.

Last year when we made a decision to downsize some things in our life, including our stuff and our house, I did the painstaking work of taking a photo of every item in the keepsake bins and tossing 95% or more of them. I kept a bin with the organized collection of Kindergarten art that the teacher made and I kept some of the pieces with specific memories, such as Mother’s Day notes. The things that fit in the category of everyday art and school work had to go. And there was a lot!! Many of the older artwork pieces were damaged or fading, or even stuck together. Had I been taking photos of these items along the way it would have been way less overwhelming.

The next step once you have your mind set on how the photos should be categorized is to create folders on your computer to start saving the photos into. I have a folder called simply “Backup_photos” and inside that folder are subfolders by the names I decided based on the above (My three folders are “Special Photos”, “Kids Art”, and the 3rd is the current year, such as “2024”). I put the family photo sessions and the school/sports/extracurricular professional photos all in the Special Photos folder. Inside the “Special Photos” folder I have four subfolders for family photos and individual photos of each of my kids. Inside each of these four subfolders, I create subfolders for each year.

As an example, the three most recent years would look like this on the computer:

>Backup_Photos

> Special Photos

>Special_family

>2022

>2023

>2024

> Special_Jacob

>2022

>2023

>2024

>Special_Jordan

>2022

>2023

>2024

>Special_Jozie

>2022

>2023

>2024

I take the extra step of changing the photo file name from the numbering system the computer uses to a dated system that puts them in chronological order. Inside the yearly casual photo folder “2024” where I put everyday photos, I would include subfolders by month so there’s 12 total in each yearly folder. Within the “2024” folder, my photo naming is just the date and a number that helps the photos stay in sequence.

For example, the first photos in January would look like this on the computer:

>Backup_Photos

>2024

>Jan

1.7.24_1

1.7.24.2

and so on

I do not suggest waiting to finish all the photo / video organization before creating a backup system for your computer (this is assuming you don’t have one). If you are paying for cloud storage, then the best option is to have your entire computer backed up to the cloud. The other option is to have an external backup drive or thumb drive to put the photos on. It sounds like a lot, but I have my photos backed up on the cloud, on a backup drive, and thumb drives (one per year). Now that I have dropped a bomb on whatever you previously thought of backing up your photo memories, don’t let it stress you out if it takes a while to get this done. I wish you the best and would love to hear your ideas!