The 2 best ways to keep your digital photos under control

Hopefully you've all gotten started with Tasks 1 and Task 2 for this month!! Task #2 was "Organize photos & videos on your computer", and I wanted to give you a few more tips to help you with this seemingly daunting task. 

With digital photography comes the ability to take as many pictures as we want! This is SO helpful when we are trying to get the perfect picture.  But SO not helpful when we end up with thousands of photos for the year!  This is what I've learned:

1.  TAKE LESS PHOTOS

Think about it...how many photos do we have of our grandparents? Some more than others...but for me, I've seen maybe a few for each stage of their lives.  I don't know about you, but that's plenty for me! I don't mean that in a rude way...it's so fun to see them when they were young, but I think I would get SO bored if I were trying to look through 300 pictures for each stage of their life. 

So, as I thought about this, and as I spent SO much time going through all the photos I took, I made the decision to simply take less photos.  For me, this means I don't need 25 pictures of us picking out pumpkins, or 25 pictures of us baking sugar cookies, etc.  Don't get me wrong, it certainly FELT like I needed them at the time.  But remember this:  TAKING LESS PHOTOS OF YOUR KIDS DOES NOT MEAN YOU LOVE YOUR FAMILY LESS!!  You are actually doing a most wonderful thing!  Not only are you spending less time with a camera in your hand, but you are spending less time organizing your photos and stressing about what to do with them too!  This will give you MORE  time to spend with your family!

I want to quote from an article I found called "Too Many Photos, Too Few Memories" : "In 2014 it is estimated that 1.5 billion smartphone cameras will take nearly one trillion photos – that’s hundreds of thousands of photos every minute (three thousand in the time it took to read this sentence)...Every two minutes mankind collectively takes as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800’s."

 Say Whaaaaat?!  Seriously people, is this necessary? The article questions if we are taking photos at the expense of creating genuine memories.  Go read the article...it's pretty interesting!

2.  DELETE

On the occasion that your finger gets "trigger happy" (so to speak) on your camera and you take WAY too many photos, that's ok!  Have no fear! There is an awesome feature called DELETE where you can select anything you want and delete it from your camera or your computer. :)  I think we get afraid to delete anything because it will be gone for good! And the pictures are SO cute...we just feel that we can't bear to delete them!  I understand your pain, I seriously do.  But you've got to get over it.  It's going to be ok. 

 

Really though, why is it so hard for some of us to delete our photos? There needs to be something called "Digital Hoarders Anonymous"!  I found an article on this and love their motto : "KEEP THE BEST, DELETE THE REST" (From Digital Photos : How to decide what to keep...great article...go read it!)

I sometimes like to delete photos straight from my camera.  Just take the 2 seconds it takes to delete the ones you know are blurry or duplicates, etc.  And then when you upload them to your computer and put them in a file under the correct month and year, just take a quick minute to go through them and delete any more that seem like duplicates.  I swear, I usually narrow my files down by HALF when I do this.  HALF of those photos I didn't need and now I don't have to deal with them cluttering up my computer and life and I STILL got some great shots to help me remember whatever it is I was taking pictures of!

With whatever pictures you end up with, be sure that you keep them organized on your computer!