Spring Fling Digital Photo Organizing Challenge #15in15in2015 (Day 11: Backups 2 Cloud)

Just to state what is (hopefully) obvious: your computer hard drive where you just organized all your digital pictures is NOT a backup. That’s the home of your originals. A backup must be a second (or third or fourth) copy of your files. By the way, Facebook is NOT a backup! (I’ll talk more about why in a minute.)

So I scolded you enough in the last post about backing up your precious photo collection. By now you should’ve done your physical backups, but THE CLOUD is an incredible off-site solution you also need to use for archiving. Note I said also, meaning “in addition to,” so if you haven’t done your physical backups yet, quit jumping ahead. Do those right now and then come back here to zap your pics to the heavens!

THE MAGICAL CLOUD
The “cloud” is a magical place that’s not really in the sky. But if it makes you feel better envisioning it there instead of in a bunch of boring server rooms across the country/globe, go for it. This online-only option for storage is remote (not local to your own home/office/computer) and redundant (assuming you’ve picked a reputable cloud service). It’s secure and private (again, assumptions abound but precautions can be taken if concerned).

 The absolute best part about anything stored “in the cloud” is that it’s accessible from anywhere. Well, technically anywhere that can get an internet signal. And since that ranges from airplanes and cruise ships these days, it’s pretty safe to say that “pert near” anywhere counts as close enough. Of course, this high-tech option has a major problem if there’s a power outage or internet service is down. You can’t get at your photos like you could if they were printed out and put in 3-ring-binder-type photo albums on your bookshelf.

However, your photos in the cloud will NOT end up waterlogged from the fire department trying to save your house from burning down (or completely turned into ash dust if they were not successful in the least). Unlike your physical backups, your cloud-backed-up photos cannot be wiped out by tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other examples of Mother Nature’s wrath. This is a major advantage of cloud archival storage.

CLOUD CONFUSION
First of all, let me state what should also be obvious…Facebook (or Instagram) is NOT a backup. While it may be “in the cloud,” these social media communities do NOT save your photos at full resolution for easy download at your convenience. That’s how they lose out on being considered a backup resource. Can you download your Facebook photos, posts & entire history? Youbetcha. And you should at least once a year just for the fun of it. Go here to learn where the data is saved, what is saved and how it can be downloaded to your computer as an archive.

Now that you made all your physical backups, you’re probably feeling pretty archive-savvy. Hopefully I don’t freak you out by mentioning the word “cloud” when it comes to backups! Because that magical “place” should definitely be part of your archive strategy. The trick is that it can be a bit overwhelming with all the options out there. The hardest part is trying to figure out which one is right for your situation and making sure everything is set up correctly to do what it should. After that, it’s pretty much on auto-pilot. Get, it clouds, plane…you with me?

“The Cloud” is not really a white puffy shape holding your data, of course. But it is sort of “out there” or “up there.” That’s why it is an excellent segment of your archive strategy — because your physical copies can be destroyed/damaged/stolen/lost/etc much easier than you may realize. Having a whole drawer full of DVD backups won’t save your photos if your whole house goes up in flames. Or gets soaked by the fire department’s hoses trying to put out the fire. Or if a pipe bursts and soaks through the ceiling right onto your computer and where you store all your external hard drives.

Remember how I said those physical backups needed to at least have one copy in an ALTERNATE LOCATION. This is why. No one knows when something bad is going to happen so being prepared in advance is the only way to insure it doesn’t destroy your photo collection too.

Cloud storage is simply the ability to save files on servers in remote locations that can be accessed via the internet from any enabled computer or device. What makes it so convenient is that it’s always there. No need to carry around your external hard drive or pile of DVD cases to have access to all your images at any time in any place.

March 31st is known as WORLD BACKUP DAY! It’s a day dedicated to reminding everyone the importance of backing up their priceless data, primarily photos in our case! Their warning “Don’t be an April fool!” is an annual reminder to do what should be done regularly, but sadly, is not. Learn more about backups and take the pledge with me on this site.

According to Backblaze, 30% of people have NEVER backed up their files. Yet 29% of disasters are caused by accident, 113 phones are lost or stolen every minute, and 1 in 10 computers are infected with viruses each month (sources per World Backup Day website).

For one thing, if you have physical backups stored in the same room/home as your main computer, and something bad happens to your property, BOTH are gone. Whether that be fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, theft, power surge, or other natural or manmade disaster, the point is that your originals (on the computer) AND your copies (on DVDs or an external hard drives) are likely destroyed as well. Double (or triple) bummer.

Sure, you can send the destroyed devices off to Drive Savers, who work miracles on rescuing data (& I highly recommend their expertise if you are up a creek without a paddle), but that involves risk and cost without a guarantee. Are you willing to risk all that just because you’re too lazy to follow a simple archival strategy? Click the banner link to learn more about what they can do and save 10% on any rescues you may need done.

If you follow my 3-2-1 BACK-UP BLAST-OFF plan, you need 3 copies, in 2 different media formats with at least one of those off-site — as a minimum! 3: Technically, the term “copies” would mean 3 versions IN ADDITION TO the original. But I think you are fine having at least a total of 3 — originals plus 2 copies. 2: To get two different media types, you need to mix up your storage choices. In other words, both copies should not be on external hard drives (EHD) due to high failure rates. Instead, you should have one EHD and one set of DVDs or USB flash drives. 1: Now make one of those copies reside off-site in a location far enough away from your primary location that a tornado, hurricane or flood would not ever affect both places at the same time. 

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I’m sure you’ve heard the Benjamin Franklin quote:

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Well, I’d like to amend that by adding “data loss” to his list. It’s almost a given that each of us will have at least one data loss (likely due to technological hardware or software failure) in our lifetimes. The only questionable part is when, because you never know when your time has come. So being properly prepared is the only way to survive this calamity.

Everyone asks…can cloud storage count as off-site? Well, technically yes! It is definitely “off-site” and it’s in another media type so that checks off two of the boxes on our 3-2-1 Back-up Blast-off plan! Some experts warn against cloud storage due to its “stormy” issues of security and privacy. Others point out that some cloud companies have come — and gone due to bankruptcy, taking with them your data in some cases.

In my personal (and professional) opinion, the cloud offers an easy, economical, nearly effortless solution to not only backup but also to sync continual changes to an alternate, off-site option that I can access from almost any digital device via the internet. That’s worth it’s weight in gold to me! I can worry less about data security/privacy problems, although some celebrities with photos of themselves in compromising situations would beg to differ. If you don’t have anything to hide, or I should say, if you aren’t afraid to show or share everything you put in the cloud, then no worries.

However, there are plenty of ways you can protect your data in the cloud, such as passwords, encryption, etc. I won’t go into detail in this post but you can search online for assistance in this area.

My number one rule regarding the cloud as a photo backup strategy is that FACEBOOK IS NOT A PHOTO BACKUP SOLUTION! Neither is INSTAGRAM! Gasp! I know many of you are either freaking out or scratching your head right now. Allow me to elaborate. Facebook and Instagram are social media SHARING sites. Facebook currently stores more than 250 BILLION images. And, more than 100 MILLION photos are uploaded to Facebook each day. Wow-za!

If you want to see a cool visual representation of what happens online in just one second, visit this cool webpage for “live” data updates for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Google and more.

SIDE NOTE: Many of us prefer to have our photos look their very best on Facebook. We’re not satisfied with the extreme compression and down-sampling Facebook has to do to hold all the photos of you and your friends out on the town, cats doing crazy cool things, and selfies, of course! If you are a professional photographer (or want to play one on the internet), you’ll want to follow these specific instructions for how to get your high-quality photos to be well-represented on Facebook. You can also download this guide if you’re a photographer concerned about Facebook’s (lack of) image quality.

Things to keep in mind:

QUALITY LIMITS
Some cloud backup services offer unlimited free storage, but only for photos that don’t go over a certain file-size limit. This means your “backup” is apples for apples. You have the files, but they aren’t the same high-resolution as your originals.

What does this mean? Say you had a JPG photo file that was from your 12 mega-pixel digital camera. Upload that to Facebook and the max you’ll have is 2048×2048 pixels, or 4.19 megapixels. Same goes for Google+. Twitter shrinks a shared photo down to 375×375 pixels or just 0.14 megapixels. And Instagram, the photo-loving site itself, only allows a maximum of 612×612 pixels, or 0.37 megapixels.

Maybe you’ve witnessed this compression phenomenon firsthand when you tried to download a photo or two off a friend’s Facebook timeline, only to find it was too tiny and poor quality for you to print it out or do anything else with it at all. There are a few solutions to working around this fact. One is offered by Facebook when you upload photos into albums at least. Choose the “high quality” option to limit compression. Other experts suggest making your file a PNG24 instead as those are not being compressed. One thing to consider is the higher-quality photo file will cause the page to load slower so keep that in mind and maybe only use it for certain specific photos.

UPLOAD TIME
One issue to consider with a cloud storage solution is the time it takes for your files to be uploaded via the internet. If you are using your home wi-fi to start a backup with a cloud site, it may freak you out how long the initial backup will take. It depends on how much data you have to backup of course, and the speed (or lack thereof) your ISP offers for uploads.

Typically the base level internet packages do not offer much for upload speeds as most of us are more worried about downloading data. But if you intend to do a major cloud backup, it might be worth asking your ISP for an upgraded plan that bumps your upload speeds to a higher level, at least until your initial backup is complete. After that, the incremental backups won’t take nearly as long!

One other way to speed up your uploads is to NOT use wi-fi but plug directly into your router via ethernet cable. This will ensure the highest possible speeds.

CLOUDS NEED INTERNET
One basic fact is that the cloud needs the internet. Without it, you can’t get to heaven, so to speak. Internet access connects you to the cloud. Most of us are pretty connected in today’s world but if you’ll be in a remote area with limited (or slow) internet access, access to cloud storage will be a challenge.

These days you can get online on planes, cruise ships, trains, vehicles, practically anywhere — so this isn’t usually a concern. However, if you are traveling and can’t access free wifi internet, you’ll be paying for service. When this happens, you typically do NOT want to use your expensive data plan for uploading photos. Save that for when you are on your own free (& protected) wi-fi.

What’s awesome about having your photos stored in the cloud is that they are accessible to you from any internet-enabled device. So you can show and share your pics with anyone right from your mobile device (phone or tablet) while you are away from home, visiting family, on vacation or anywhere on the planet.

THE [KITCHEN] SYNC
Cloud storage isn’t the best unless it can sync, meaning update regularly. Say you upload your photos to your cloud provider. Then you go back and edit a few of those photos. You don’t want to risk losing your updates, do you? And you don’t want to manually go to upload the ones you edit each time back to the cloud. You want it to happen auto-magically! And that’s what syncing can do. It checks every so often (some intervals can be determined by you) to see if any files have been changed. If they have, it will upload the new version to the cloud for you. Done deal.

CLOUD CHOICES
I’m not going to delve into great detail over all the options available as this will become its own specific series at a later date. I will mention many of the choices out there and let you do your own research to decide your best solution. You may want to study their privacy policies, security protocols, sharing options, file types, and of course, storage limits.

Google Drive, Crashplan, and Dropbox are three of the heavy hitters for cloud storage. Best of all, these offer automatic uploading and syncing, which are a must-have when it comes to backing up photos. Unless you are the type who manually backs up photos daily. [I doubt those people exist. And if they do, they certainly aren’t reading my Spring Fling Digital Photo Organizing Challenge blog!]

Personally, I use the first two right now. I’ve only used Dropbox for “other” file types and sharing with colleagues but I know many people depend on it for photo storage too.

GOOGLE DRIVE
The giant among all things online is a pro at saving your stuff. Best of all, if you’ve been using Picasa like me to organize your photos, you are automatically linked to Google for a number of awesome features like Web Albums, backups, and so on. Now there is a whole lesson on Google+ and how that works with your photos but if nothing else, Google gives you a way to save your photos on its servers.

iCLOUD FROM APPLE
Signing up gets you 5GB of free storage with options to upgrade for an additional monthly fee. For example, you can pay $19.99/month for 1TB (terabyte) of storage in the U.S. and Canada. However, that number isn’t just for photos — it also includes Mail, Backup, iCloud Photo Library beta, and iCloud drive, as well as a few other apps that use iCloud to keep files up-to-date across devices. None of the media you’ve purchased counts against that storage though.

If you’re an Apple lover like me, you’ve heard of the recently released (in beta) iCloud Photo Library. The Camera Roll and My Photo Stream were merged into a single “All Photos” album on your device. Learn all about its features and functionality here.

AMAZON CLOUD DRIVE
Another giant in the online world, Amazon offers cloud storage (as well as actually operates cloud storage for the large majority of other cloud storage companies). They know the cloud because in many cases, they ARE the cloud!

A recent announcement was made that all can receive unlimited cloud photo storage as an added benefit. You had better be taking advantage of this as well as your free two-day shipping! It’s a no brainer! It has an app that makes mobile uploads (& viewing) a breeze.

The only hitch is that there’s a 5GB limit for videos (& other file types so if you take quite a few clips of action footage, you’ll reach the limit on that. Of course, you can always buy more storage if need be. Since this news came out, I made sure to take full advantage of this solution and am happy about it so far!

CRASHPLAN/BACKBLAZE
A true backup runs like Crashplan or Backblaze. You set it up and after the initial backup upload to their servers, all backups will be incremental — only updating/adding any new files or recently modified ones through syncing. The best part is that you can put these services on “auto-pilot” so you don’t really have to remember to backup. That said, I’d prefer you take matters into your own hands to consciously impact the youth.

TIME MACHINE BY APPLE
Time Machine is backup software through OSX by Apple. It automatically records to an external hard drive that you designate as your backup.

OTHER OPTIONS:

Shutterfly is the photo printing giant of the industry. Founded in 1999, this massive company owns several brands under its umbrella of photo-gift-related publishing. You can enjoy unlimited photo storage for free with no need to purchase to avoid deletion. One really cool feature of Shutterfly is its recent purchase of the This Life app for organizing photos via mobile, desktop and cloud. I’m a definite fan of this system and will be writing a detailed review in the coming months.

Snapfish is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. Owned by printing/computing giant Hewlett-Packard, it still offers unlimited photo storage for free as long as you buy at least one thing — even if that’s one 9-cent photo print — per year.

Dropbox was designed as a file-sharing site — not necessarily a photo-specific site, although it has evolved into a solution that is often adequate for many users wishing to save their photos.

Flickr is an image-hosting site launched in 2004, but acquired by Yahoo in 2005. A new, much-improved user interface design came out about a year ago that brought back many of the fans who’d left. Giving everyone 1000GB of free space, Flickr’s generous storage policy makes it a favorite of photographers and photo fanatics alike.

SmugMug is a 13-year-old family-owned company that stores your photos online, and so much more. Its highlights include the gorgeous gallery sites you can create yourself to feature your photos. You can even opt to sell them should you choose the commerce options in its Business plan for $25/month. The cheapest Basic plan is just $3.34/mo, with a Power user at $5/mo and a Portfolio package for $12.50/mo.

Mylio is not necessarily a cloud hosting solution only. It’s a brand-new photo organizing option that definitely looks like an ideal choice for me. I’m only new to it so I can’t fully vouch for it but intend to “test” it extensively this year. Maybe I’ll be able to do a full review in a few months. I do know that it has the seal of approval from many top photographers in the industry so that should say something.

PictureLife, Trunx, Shoebox and Dropshots are all options with an app that I’ve been using for a while now. I’ll cover these at a later date.

In summary, know that the cloud should be part of your 3-2-1 Back-up Blast-off plan as it satisfies two of the three criteria — a non-physical copy that’s not physically present.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about sharing photos on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on.

Spring Fling Digital Photo Organizing Challenge #15in15in2015 (Day 10: Backups 1)

Back-em up, buttercup! Today we’re talking about the only way you can truly save your photos. Think about all the forward progress you made over the past 9 days. Feels pretty awesome, doesn’t it?

Now imagine all those sorted, named, labeled, captioned, starred, tagged, face identified, album-arranged photos disappearing in the blink of an eye. GONE! One second and all your effort is vaporized. Hurts, huh?

From external hard drives (top shelf) to optical media like CDs & DVDs (bottom shelf), physical backups are an easy, economical solution, but they are only PHASE ONE in your archival strategy!

My goal is to help you avoid the agony of regret by proactively preserving your pictures. To do that, you need to back them up. Sure, you say, duh, I knew that. Oh yeah, well how many of you have actually done it? On a regular basis? With 3 copies in 2 different formats with one being off-site? Yeah, I thought so. Feeling a bit inadequate right now? That’s okay. You’re not alone at all. But we don’t want you to be sob story of what happens when your computer crashes, hard drive fails, tornado wipes out your whole house, or the kids accidentally spill a can of soda over your laptop.

They’re called accidents because they aren’t planned. But you CAN plan on being prepared by taking the steps today to (finally!) get your photos (& other files if you wish) archived.

You must have an archival strategy. This includes not only the choice of media and location of storage solutions, but also the schedule or system for performing regular, routine backups beyond this initial archive of your photo collection.

Would you believe that today’s “Digital Generation” is in danger of losing everything? Their entire life history in photos? While they may be the most photographed generation, they are at risk to have no pictures in a decade? One photographer wrote a thought-provoking blogabout this growing problem. He feels that most of what we shoot today isn’t really important enough to print. Or save. So sad. Hope that’s not the case — and it must not be if you’re here bothering to read this & do my daily steps for 15 days to get organized!

PHYSICAL BACKUPS CAN’T BE BEAT
First of all, let me state what should be obvious…your computer hard drive where you just organized all your digital pictures is NOT a backup. That’s the home of your originals. A backup must be a second (or third or fourth) copy of your files. By the way, Facebook is NOT a backup! (I’ll talk more about that next when I cover DIGITAL backups.)

Anyone remember these? Floppy disks that weren’t even floppy! Only the first larger versions were if you old folks remember that. Then we went to these sturdy plastic versions. But they were replaced by CDs, which then went to DVDs, and now we’re starting to see Blu-Ray discs as an even larger-capacity solution!

Consider the life expectancy of your media choice. If something has an average life span of 5 years, that means HALF of those devices will fail before that! Here in Vegas, we call that “the roll of the dice!” Can you easily make another copy of your media? Can you easily update your backup to add in your newer files? Can you be sure that technology will be around 5 years from now?

EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES
One easy physical way to back up all your photos from your computer hard drive is to use an external hard drive, or EHD. This is like a second computer (minus the operating system & such) so it makes sense to copy your photos onto it.

With the price of EHDs dropping and the capacity rising, you can find a huge terabyte hard drive for less than $70. That’s a small price to pay for the peace of mind and safekeeping of your entire digital photo collection, especially if you consider at least a few of those shots to be pretty priceless!

Most of them simply plug in via USB to your computer, making it fairly simply to copy the files over. And should the need arise, you can easily restore your photos from that EHD backup to a new computer if that’s the case. (Congrats on the new hardware, by the way! I’m jelly! That’s jealous, for you non-hipster lingo peeps!)

Portable hard drives are an ideal peripheral product because they don’t require external power, are small enough to carry conveniently, and work with multiple computers for file sharing/syncing. Most models come with backup software to ensure automatically scheduled backups and file syncing in a compact, phone-sized package. Granted, the smaller they are, they easier they are to lose, or drop — both of which will ruin your backup strategy!

Western Digital is a respected name in data storage. This thin 1 terabyte USB drive with auto backup software is on sale at Amazon for just $65 (Prime eligible)! The 2TB model is priced at $99. Wowza! Click the image to order from Amazon or to shop for other brands, capacities, and styles.

I own numerous external hard drives. My first ones were larger and required a power source. My most-recent ones are thin, tiny and only need USB power. Surprisingly, the smaller ones hold more photos and cost much less than the earlier editions!

The other problem is that some 90% of EHDs will fail. Typically within the five years of life. With. No. Warning. Could be 6 months in, or 2.5 years or 4-plus years. Since you don’t know when it will one day croak, you can’t simply depend on just this backup either. And you have to plan to upgrade your EHDs every couple years. Kind of like trading in your car/phone/computer for a newer, updated model.

By all means, use an EHD, but with caution and care, realizing their days are numbered and you’ll never know when its death will suddenly cost you all of your priceless digital photos. Better yet, get two of them and rotate them every so often, keeping one drive off-site. I’ll talk more about this in a bit.

USB/THUMB DRIVES
You might be lured into thinking a simple USB flash/thumb drive can solve all your problems as a small, economical backup source. And you might be just fine. In fact, some research shows that these are often a very stable storage device with a life expectancy of 5 to 8 years, slightly longer than optical media like the standard DVD.

Until, that is, the USB drive gets lost because it’s so tiny and portable. Or left in a pocket that goes through the washing machine. Or splashed by a spill of coffee or water. In other words, these tiny backups are the ultimate in convenience, but they can also be damaged or lost, effectively deleting all your photos. So this isn’t the only option you should use as a backup either.

OPTICAL MEDIA OPTIONS
If you don’t have a zillion (or so) photos to back-up, you might be able to back them up to optical media such as a CD or DVD. These media are often extremely economical and easy to burn from your computer hard drive. My suggestion is to stick to DVD for the greater file capacity as it holds 4.7GB vs. 700MB on a CD. I’m sure you have more than 700MB of photos. Otherwise you are crazy…go take more pictures! Now! The next step beyond DVD is the Blu-Ray disc that can hold up to 50GB on a dual-layer disc. That’s about 10 standard DVDs or 70 recordable CDs! And there’s talk of even larger capacity discs on the horizon — one company is offering a 100GB version any day now!

THE GOLD STANDARD
When it comes to DVDs, there are plenty of cheap, department-store brands sold in bulk. That said, there are also more-expensive options that are expressly made for archiving. These are often called “gold” DVDs, but the color isn’t the only way you can tell. Usually a premium price tag buys you greater peace of mind that the media will not fail as easily or as soon. Of course, most of them don’t offer a warranty or refund if it does before their advertised life expectancy. And even if they did, it doesn’t mean you get your photos back — just some cash back, which may help you buy file recovery software to try to rescue your lost JPGs. For the sake of today, I’ll keep this positive!

Most DVDs burn data into an organic dye layer that begins to degrade and fade right away, leading to “data rot.” In fact, the National Archives warns that the shelf life of a standard recordable DVD may be as short as 2 years, although a general estimate is 3-7 years on average.

Get Delkin’s Archival Gold DVD-R “100 Year Disc” with Scratch Armor Surface 25-pack spindle for just $79.95 (Amazon Prime).

A Delkin Archival Gold DVD is advertised to last 100 years, while their 25GB Blu-Ray version is promoted with a 200-year life expectancy! According to their website, “Archival Gold is the only storage medium guaranteed 100% uneditable, inerasable and tested to endure up to 200 years, based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology.” Now that’s a few generations worth!

Verbatim claims to be the “Number 1 Optical Brand in the World” as it sells a full-line of discs, including UltraLife™ Archival Grade Gold DVDs for 100-year life. It also offers a Photo DVD-R product specifically for archiving photos. It uses patented AZO™technology to secure the original quality of the digital image, plus a Crystal coating applied to protect the recording layer and label surface from data-damaging scratches.

SET IN STONE
When it comes to archival, stone scribbles have stood the test of time for the most part. Just like cavemen scribed their lives on the walls of their cave, the M-Disc actually etches your data onto a stone-type surface, offering what the company promotes as 1,000-year storage solution. Now that’s what I call long term! I’m a big fan of the M-Disc product line but it does require a compatible drive to burn them so read all about them on their website. Or click the image of the 15-pack spindle below to buy them (& the external drive) on Amazon!

Click to shop for a 15-pack of 25GB M-Disc Blu-Rays & the compatible drive for recording them right on Amazon! And yes, they are eligible for free shipping with PRIME!

R+ OR R- BUT NOT RW
Whether you go with DVD-R or DVD+R depends on your computer and DVD drive. However, it should go without saying not to choose RW discs but if you don’t pay attention, you might end up with a spindle of these. While they are great for storing documents you need to temporarily access and transport, they are terrible for long-term archival storage because they can easily (albeit accidentally) be written over. Does anyone remember the long-ago days of the lowly VCR tape when you’d discover you taped over something else you wanted to keep? Argh! Choose DVD-R or DVD+R only.

OFF-LABEL USE
While I’m a big fan of labeling your backup discs, please be very careful with anything that goes ON the actual disc. You’re better off printing something that goes on the case and using a basic Sharpie pen to identify the contents of the disc. I’ve heard far too many horror stories of paper sticker labels that get ripped up and caught inside your computer’s disc drive, ruining both at once!

Now there are inkjet printable discs that eliminate the potential paper problems of earlier options. Look for this option when purchasing your DVDs. You can design a printed “label” for each DVD that includes a representative photo (or collage), and any text and dates to help identify the photos included on it.

PRINT FILE WINDOW
One thing you’ll want to do besides labeling your actual DVD is printing out the file directory list of what’s on it. To do this, you can use the PRINT SCREEN, PASTE & PRINT process in Windows. Or you can run a command to generate a list.txt file for editing later using thesestep-by-step directions.

On a Mac, it used to be as easy as choosing the Print Window option from the menu bar before OSX came to be. Since then, it requires some jumping through hoops or taking a screen shot to paste into something else so you can print it.

Or you could try out a nifty software app aptly named Print Window that lets you control which folders/files to expand and print, plus adjust the font and size. It has auto-format options for fitting onto a CD jewel case or DVD box case. You can even make a photo proof contact sheet showing thumbnails of all your images! How handy would that be? I’m sold on this idea but will have to try out the free version. The full version is $20 but if it helps me print files & folders for all my archives, including contact sheets of all my images, it would be well worth it. Of course, printing these in color will be rather costly ink-wise, especially if you have as many images as I do. Saving them as a PDF you can open and reference at any time probably makes more sense than a full physical copy.

Picasa’s “Print Contact Sheet” can be a helpful feature! Click here to view it larger.

Better yet, Picasa has a built-in feature to print a contact sheet from a folder. Simply select a certain folder first, then click the FOLDER menu to choose “Print Contact Sheet..” and you’ll see them nicely organized by thumbnails with the album name and date. You’ll have an option to either “shrink to fit” or “crop to fit” the pics into the thumbnails. Click on the other choice to see your options & pick a fave. I noticed it rotates any vertical photos sideways, probably to show enough of the image, although it still bothers me a bit.

DATA CORRUPTION
Any archival solution runs the risk of data corruption, transfer failure or device death/obsolescence. Some experts say you should regularly check your data source by “running” it once in a while to actively seek and open a few files. That way, if you start to see any fishy behavior, you might be able to salvage the majority of your data before the whole thing blows. For your long-term archival storage, the pros suggest occasional testing of the data once every 6 months and migrating to a newer (or just different) media source every 3-5 years.

SAFE STORAGE
Aside from the obvious advice about putting the cap back on USB thumb drives, you’ll need to keep CDs/DVDs in their cases, and carefully handling them by their edges only to avoid fingerprints and scratches.

Don’t forget about storage solutions to keep your special backup disks safe from scratches, extreme temperature swings, dust, and such. Careful handling and using the case is a start. If you end up with a large collection of discs, you’ll need to find a way to store them.

This handsome double-wide CD/DVD storage box safely & smartly stores your archives in a classy way that looks great on display. For less than $10 with Amazon Prime, you can also opt for the one to hold DVDs in their larger box cases.

To be literal, I suppose you could keep them in a fireproof, theft-proof safe in your home. Or better yet, at the bank in a safe deposit box, which gets you the ultimate in protection as well as off-site benefits.

However, you can just keep the cased discs in a cool, dark, dry space, such as your a shelf in your bedroom closet, in a dresser drawer or in a box under a bed.

Do NOT keep optical discs in the garage, basement or attic, as the extreme temperature swings and humidity will degrade the data. Ideally, your data archives need to be kept in a space that’s heated and cooled, depending on your location and season, as well as one that handles humidity. That’s why an off-site storage space won’t work unless it’s an indoor one that’s climate-controlled.

To avoid heat, cold, humidity, dust, debris, scratches, fingerprints, or sunlight, please do NOT store optical discs or delicate drives inside your vehicle, kids’ rooms, bathroom, kitchen, laundry room, outdoor storage shed, shoebox buried in the yard, etc. Try to keep them away from water, dust, bright sunlight, harsh surfaces, kids, and extreme temps.

PHOTO PRINTS
I can’t talk about physical backups without mentioning the lowly photo print! Remember these? Back in the days of film, everyone HAD to print their pictures just to see what you shot. Now it seems like if we’ve “seen” it in our camera or phone, we don’t even bother getting a physical copy to hold. And that’s a crying shame!

Should you (or could you) print ALL of your digital photos? Probably not. I know I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to pay for all those prints, no matter what the sale offer. Let alone the shipping cost. I also don’t want to pile up a zillion (that’s about how many I have) photo prints that I would then have to sort, organize, label, and store somehow.

It just doesn’t make sense to turn an all-digital collection into a physical prints one, as that has its own issues with space, clutter, and safe-keeping, of course. How many of you have had a toddler tear/Sharpie/crumple/etc a printed photo? So that’s not the only solution either.

But you SHOULD print SOME (or all) of your STARS! If all else failed, and I mean your digital backups on hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs, and such, you’d still have printed copies of your most prized photos. And those can be scanned into digital files again if absolutely necessary. At that point, your slight quality degradation from losing an iteration of your image will be the least of your worries. If this sentence didn’t make much sense to you, that’s okay. It’s just pointing out the fact that a copy of a copy is never as nice as the original. If you’ve ever tried to photocopy a crappy photocopy, you know what I mean. It doesn’t get better, that’s for sure!

I’m not going to analyze or advise on WHO/WHERE to get photo prints made, but I can tell you that the quality and service you’ll get from a local photo retailer (real store run by photo experts) will always outperform any online option or discount department store. You can Google side-by-side comparisons of quality (paper and color and clarity) for about any mainstream service on the market. You do want the colors to be true and sharp. And if the paper isn’t archival-quality, it won’t last as long as it should, defeating the point of having it as a backup to your backups. But if you aren’t prepared to handle the prints when they come into your home, you’ll soon be looking for blogs on how to organize prints. What’s that you say? You already have that problem too? No worries. I’ll be covering that soon but this is my primary concern — and should be yours too!

But the primary point for printing your photos is to ENJOY them, share them and show them off. Put them in frames around your home and office. Don’t let them be held hostage on your hard drive! Or be an unknown entity on a shiny circular DVD. Let them come to life in your own life!

I’ll talk more about ideas for printing beyond the basic 4×6 photo print but if you do nothing else, printing your starred favorites and putting them out to be seen and shared will still be considered a victory!

Groovebook is a great phone app to quickly (& cheaply) print the pictures off your mobile phone! Each month, you can get 100 pics printed (& shipped to your door) for $2.99. Try them out for a free Groovebook with my KRUSE58 code! I’ve been doing this a full year now, and many months I end up ordering a couple to get all mine printed.

GET IN THE GROOVEBOOK
I’ve become a fan of the Groovebook app, which was recently bought out by Shutterfly after appearing on the TV show Shark Tank. For $2.99/month, it prints 100 photos from my mobile phone and ships them to my door. It’s super simple to select the ones you want to upload, and then the app automatically processes the print order on your monthly deadline day and ships you this fun booklet of your prints.

Each print has a perforated edge so you can choose to keep them in the book as a whole, like a mini photo album of sorts. Or, tear out the ones you want to share with loved ones, frame or scrapbook. Photo quality is not the highest but it’s an almost hands-off, relatively instant way to get pictures printed off my iPhone at least. I’ll talk about this more in a later post about playing & publishing your pictures. Use CODE (KRUSE58) to get a free Groovebook sample of your own!

PHYSICAL LIMITS
Obviously, any physical backup system is at risk for natural disasters, including fire, flood, tornado/hurricane, theft, and unsupervised toddlers. So even if you have your photos on your main computer hard drive, an external hard drive, a set of DVDs, flash drives and prints organized into albums…you’ll lose them all in an instant with Mother Nature’s wrath or a homeowner incident if they are all kept in the same general location (your home or office).

Drive Savers is a trusted name in data recovery so if you have something happen, call them right away! Here they explain the 3 main types of catastrophic circumstances — physical, logical (if you can call accidentally deleting your photos “logical”) & what I call, Mother Nature’s wrath. They also have a fun part of their site called the “Museum of Bizarre Disk-asters” highlighting catastrophic circumstances & their rescues! Learn all about them by clicking this image.

Redundancy (multiple copies) is a key strategy in archiving but if all those copies are in the same physical geographic location, you’re risking it all. “Colocation” is a technical term that can refer to off-site data storage but it applies to your own photo backup too. Move at least one copy of your backups to a second location that’s outside your primary computer’s location. Even better is to make sure your backup-to-the-backup is in an off-site location that’s outside your same region. In other words, a tornado/hurricane/earthquake can wipe out a stretch of a town that could include BOTH your home and your mom’s house if you’re only a few blocks away. Think further out like a different town, or state! Sure, you may have to ship it there or deliver it when you go to visit but you can rest easy knowing that the same natural disaster is not likely to affect both copies!

Click to buy the perfect cases for all your CDs & DVDs! Slim to fit more on a shelf & colorful for coordinating your files! Image links to this best-selling product on Amazon, currently just $10.48 & Prime eligible!

JUST IN CASE
The easiest way to keep your optical media safe is to store them in cases. If you buy the economical disc spindle, you’ll want to buy coordinating cases. There are now slim versions that don’t take up as much space on a shelf.

You can also store them inside vinyl sleeve pocket sheets that go into 3-ring binders. Some are made to look extra nice like high-end photo albums you wouldn’t mind looking at on your bookshelf or desk.

Other disc storage devices depend on how many you’ll need to hold. Always buy more space than you currently have discs so there’s room to grow/add as you continue your archiving efforts. Tomorrow I’ll cover the digital side of archiving by backing up to the CLOUD! Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it until you understand.

Want a fancy but durable, dust-free case for 80 discs? Here’s one economical ($14.89) version on Amazon Prime.

Upgrade to gorgeous shelf storage for your DVDs/CDs with these leather-look albums on Amazon. The pages inside are sleeves for discs so each album holds many discs.

DAY 10 — 15 MINUTES. LET’S GET PHYSICAL WITH OUR BACKUPS!

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and determine your backup strategy by deciding how you’ll backup your photos — to CD/DVDs, flash/thumb drives, external hard drives. Decide which photos to print and how you plan to print.

Now open Picasa and click on at least one album or folder. Under the TOOLS menu, choose “Back Up Pictures…” to then see all your available photos to select for backup. After you check all the boxes for the ones you want (or just “select all”), Picasa will total up how many GBs you’ll need, even how many DVDs or CDs that would take. Of course, if you backup to a large-enough external hard drive or flash drive, you’ll only need to do the backup “BURN/COPY” process once.

Be sure to create a backup “set” to identify which pictures, where to back them up, whether to include all files, all pictures (no videos), or just JPEGs with camera information. I recommend ALL to be safe, but you can test how big the backup would be with the various options. Maybe you’ll just want to backup videos elsewhere or whatever may be. After you create this “set,” you can choose it next time to do an “incremental backup,” meaning just the ones that have been added or modified since the initial backup. Yes, you’ll be revisiting this step in the future so get familiar with it!

In summary, your DAY 10 DUTIES:

1. DETERMINE YOUR ARCHIVAL STRATEGY BY CHOOSING THE MEDIA TYPES YOU WILL USE FOR BACKUPS.
2. ORDER ANY PERIPHERAL PRODUCTS YOU NEED FOR ARCHIVING (CD/DVD/BLU-RAY DISCS & RECORDING DRIVES, EXTERNAL/PORTABLE HARD DRIVES, USB FLASH DRIVES, CASES & STORAGE SOLUTIONS).
3. OPEN PICASA AND LOOK UNDER THE TOOLS MENU FOR “BACK UP PICTURES.”
4. CREATE A BACKUP SET TO CHOOSE THE MEDIA & FILE TYPES, THEN SELECT ALL THE ALBUMS & FOLDERS TO BURN/COPY YOUR BACKUP TO THE SOURCE YOU CHOOSE.
5. AFTER CREATING/BURNING MULTIPLE COPIES OF YOUR ARCHIVE, PUT THEM IN APPROPRIATE LOCATIONS USING PROPER SAFE STORAGE SOLUTIONS. 
6. MARK YOUR CALENDAR (SCHEDULE A REMINDER IN YOUR PHONE) TO SYNC UPDATED PHOTOS TO YOUR BACKUP SOURCES & SWAP OUT THE DEVICES AS NEEDED.

WHOA WARNING
Be sure to backup your ALBUMS as well as your folders! Because, if you remember, the FOLDERS are where your photos actually reside. Your ALBUMS need to be saved too so Picasa can retain all your organization as well. Otherwise if you load these onto another computer later, all that effort will be lost. You’ll still have your JPGs of course, and the tags that you identified them with, but not all that helpful organization and details from your ALBUMS. You can also backup your PEOPLE albums, or FACE/NAME tags. Re-read my post on that to make sure your faces get saved correctly WITH the photo file so you don’t lose all that priceless “people” info!

TALKING TIME LIMITS
This step might take some time as burning optical media discs depends on the speed of the drive. It may be something you let run overnight or while you go somewhere until it finishes. It may also take a little time messing around with printing your files/folders to go with the discs and drives. Unless you’ve already used this feature, your first few will take longer but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to archive as fast as can be.

Remember, this is your initial backup so it will take the longest. After this, your backups will only be incremental, meaning much less waiting while your files copy! Unless, of course, you wait far too long (like 6 months to a year) before doing another backup…then you’ll have to wait a while too!

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Spring Fling Digital Photo Organizing Challenge #15in15in2015 (Day 9: Albums)

Who wants to be a photo organizing rock star and record your first album? That’s what we’re doing today in our 15-minute “recording” session. These will be your “Best of” or “Greatest Hits” collection that’s sure to go platinum! To be number one on the charts, you have to choose your best photos and sort them into albums to best save and share them.

BE A PHOTO ORGANIZING ROCK STAR — MAKE ALBUMS
Back in my day, music “albums” were also known as records, or vinyl. Today, youngsters with their divine digital birthright can’t comprehend this prehistoric music concept as they hardly understand CDs, let alone LPs!

Although the term continues to linger in the industry much like the fact that iPhones use a “camera ROLL” to hold your photos, the word album still generally refers to a collection of music worth sharing. Another way to think about albums is like a playlist in iTunes. It’s just a set grouping of favorites you chose and organized in a certain way.

Well it’s the same concept for photos! An ALBUM we make in Picasa is a collection of your photos — not all of them, preferably just the STARS! No, we’re not talking about those 1980s edition photo albums with the sticky page you peel back to stick your prints inside.

(Side note: If you think you’re all set with your photographs from the past because you have your prints stored “safely” in photo albums like the ones mentioned, I hate to burst your bubble but these have been proven UNSAFE for photos, and are actually eating your pictures up as time goes on! Please pull out all your prints from these old photo albums immediately to avoid any additional damage! Now back to our regularly scheduled post about digital…)

ALBUMS AREN’T FOLDERS
The big thing to remember is that Picasa doesn’t treat ALBUMS the same as FOLDERS. Your photos only exist in their folders! Making an album in Picasa does NOT duplicate them on your hard drive. An ALBUM simply points to the photos that reside in their usual location. They’re basically a “virtual view” of your photos.

So to delete a photo for real, do it from your FOLDERS section and the image will be gone for good. Delete it from an album and it just removes the reference to it in that instance. It doesn’t do anything to the real JPG.

By the way, Picasa only shows folders that have at least one photo in them. So if you have some empty folders, they won’t show here until there’s at least one JPG in it.

Take extra caution if you want to delete an entire folder because it will also delete any subfolders inside it. That’s why using the “tree view” helps avoid mistakes like this because you can see the parent folder and any related “children” folders inside/under it. Only delete from the lowest-level subfolder so you don’t accidentally delete a folder, or nested folders, by accident.

Flat folder view arranges them by date or name (view options) but the tree view shows them exactly as they are on your hard drive. Under “view options,” you can sort by name or date, and reverse sort to get the opposite effect.

In Picasa’s Collections List along the left side, you’ll see ALBUMS, PEOPLE, PROJECTS and FOLDERS. (You may see a few other categories but these are the main ones). TIP: In the FOLDERS section, if you select the “tree view” instead of the default “flat folder view,” you can see them in the same hierarchical structure as you have them on your hard drive — the same thing we did on the first few days. The tree view helps you see the event sub-folders in relation to your sorted date folders. We covered PEOPLE and name tags yesterday. We’ll talk about PROJECTS another day. So today is ALBUMS!

NEW ALBUMS ROCK
Say you went on an incredible vacation and took 1000 (or whatever exorbitant number) of photos of your trip. No one, I repeat…NO ONE, is going to want to look at ALL of your pics no matter how amazing you say they are. Unless you are a National Geographic photographer, then maybe. You’ll need to cull the collection down to a more-reasonable summary or highlight reel that people will enjoy (rather than endure) viewing.
If you’ve already done your STAR process to find your favorites (& you should’ve since that was Day 5!), this step is uber-easy. Click on a folder with quite a few pictures in it. (Make sure this folder has marked stars in it.) Click the “SELECT STARRED PHOTOS” yellow star icon at the top left near the folder name. It will highlight any star photos in that folder and show them as tiny thumbnails in the Photo Tray (lower left corner). Just click “Add selected items to an Album” with the “blue book” button just to the right of this.

A drop-down menu asks you to create a “New Album” (or put them in an existing album if you have one or more). New Album pops up a Properties window (shown below) so you can add details beyond just the name and date. Yes, you should fill in the “optional” details of Place taken & Description (caption/story)! If you plan to view this album in a slideshow or movie (& you probably will), you can check the box to use music and find that file on your computer too.

For this example, I selected some STAR shots from my New Year’s Eve fireworks photos. Now I can create an ALBUM of Strip Fireworks Photos. I can add past year’s fireworks to this same album. And even ones from July 4th if I want! So all my best Vegas Strip fireworks shots will be in one place for easier viewing and sharing!

You can add more photos to this ALBUM at any time from any other folder. If you went on vacation to several of Utah’s National Parks, you could make albums for “Best of Bryce” and “Best of Zion” but you could also group those together into a “Best of Utah” album. Again, these are NOT copying the photos — just pointing to them where they already safely reside in their sorted & labeled folders on your hard drive.

Another excellent use of ALBUMS would be for grouping your favorite photos of a certain person, maybe your children. Of course, you can always use the PEOPLE feature for this but sometimes you want to see just your all-time faves, not ALL their pics. To make this album, look in the PEOPLE collection under that person. Click to “select starred photos” and create an album for the “Best of FILL-IN-THE-BLANK NAME.”

Now after you are done uploading new photos and doing your star/caption/tag efforts, you can quickly drop the ones you love most into these special “highlight reel” albums. That said, this is ideal for any high school seniors who want those graduation slide shows! Make your own by clustering them into an ALBUM right in Picasa. Now click the green arrow “PLAY FULLSCREEN SLIDESHOW” for your new “blue-book” album and modify the effects as you wish. You can also create a COLLAGE or a full-fledged MOVIE PRESENTATION complete with title slides, clips, captions and more.

Another fun option in Picasa is to look under the CREATE menu for “Create a Gift CD.” This lets you put specific photos together onto a CD, and even lets you opt to include a copy of Picasa so the recipient can view them easily, along with an optional slideshow as well.

DAY 9 — 15 MINUTES. ROCK THE STAR ALBUMS!

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and open Picasa. Figure out what photos you’d like to pull into an ALBUM from your starred favorites. Open that FOLDER, click the “select starred photos” star icon and put the selected items into their own album with the “blue book” icon to the right of the photo tray. Create a new album (fill in properties pop-up window) and then fill from other folders as you wish. You can also right-click on any photo to “add to album” or create new album with it.

By pulling out your best photos and arranging them into sorted photo ALBUMS that make sense, you’ve made your entire photo collection more meaningful! As a reward when done making your rock “star albums,” enjoy playing your full-screen slideshows (with or without captions on)!

In summary, your DAY 9 DUTIES:

1. OPEN PICASA & VIEW A FOLDER WITH STARRED PHOTOS IN IT THAT YOU WANT TO PUT INTO AN ALBUM.
2. CLICK THE YELLOW STAR ICON TO “SELECT STARRED PHOTOS” SO THEY GO INTO THE PHOTO TRAY.
3. CLICK THE “BLUE BOOK” ICON TO THE RIGHT OF THE TRAY TO CREATE A NEW ALBUM.
4. FILL OUT THE NEW ALBUM PROPERTIES FOR BETTER SEARCHING & REFERENCE LATER.
5. PULL IN ANY OTHER PHOTOS TO THIS ALBUM & MAKE OTHERS AS NEEDED TO SORT OUT YOUR BEST “STAR” PHOTOS FOR EASY SHARING & SAVING. 
6. VIEW FULL-SCREEN SLIDESHOW, MAKE A PHOTO COLLAGE OR MOVIE PRESENTATION, OR CREATE A GIFT CD WITH YOUR “BLUE BOOK” ALBUMS.

WHOA WARNING
Remember, ALBUMS are just virtual playlists that reference your photos from their location in FOLDERS. If you make albums and delete all your folders, you will have a mess because the albums won’t be able to find the actual photo! Same goes for moving your folders around. If you change the location, the album will get “lost” trying to find those photos again. You can usually correct this but that’s why I didn’t tell you about this until AFTER we’ve done all our organization, sorting and folder naming. Hopefully you don’t have to modify them much so your albums stay together.

An easy way to remind yourself is that folders are always shown as blue manilla folders and albums are always shown as blue books. 

TALKING TIME LIMITS
This shouldn’t take too long and it should be a fun process. It depends entirely on how many albums you choose to create. Don’t skip this step as it’s a valuable one because it physically shows you the best of the best — your favorite photos you cherish the most! These are the ones you’d be heartbroken if they were lost…whether that be to theft of your laptop, hard drive crash, accidental deletion or failed backup. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post about just that — backups!

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Spring Fling Digital Photo Organizing Challenge #15in15in2015 (Day 7: Tags)

To carry on our story-saving, memory-preserving caption-writing efforts of yesterday, we’re going to learn about keywords, also known as tags, which are helpful facts that will give your photos an added level of organization by making them easily searchable.

JUST GOOGLE IT
Think about how you simply go to Google and type in whatever words are in your brain to describe the topic you seek. Those word choices are “search terms” that are essentially metadata. Imagine if you could Google “Paul’s 4^th birthday” and it would magically find all those photos in an instant and show them to you. That would be pretty awesome, right? Well, guess what? We’re going to do that process for your pictures so you can type in some basic terms/keywords/tags and let Picasa be your Google to pull the pics with those matching words. Woohoo!

Now just to clarify for you security-scaredy-cat folks, your photo metadata CANNOT really be read by Google or any other search engines. I’m merely pointing out that it works in a similar fashion to a search engine, but this searching is all done on your own computer to find your own photo files!

Maybe I should’ve used the example of a stock photo website instead. It allows you to search for specific terms to find the perfect image from its vast gallery. Without those search terms (keywords) tagged to the images, they won’t be easily found.

If you’ve looked at a stock photo site, click on an image and check out the keyword list. I’m sure you’ll find a few that don’t seem like words you’d use to describe that photo, but that’s why the success of keywording partially depends on thinking like the person who will be searching. Great news if it’s going to be you most of the time! You know you best!

METADATA MANIA
What in the world is metadata and why must I learn another tech term? Metadata is hidden information attached to every image file that provides additional details for your reference. Why on earth do I care, you ask?

In addition to the image data of your JPG, each image also contains technical information from the camera that captured it. Facts about the camera model, date/time, lens, aperture, ISO, flash, and location (if geo-tag enabled) are recorded to an EXIF file that always stays with the image. You can usually view this info by clicking the “get info” or “properties” menu for any photo, although it’s not often editable.

Commonly called “keywords” or “tags,” metadata is “hidden” data that is tied to your JPG, adding helpful information that can be used to find a specific photo when searching. Obviously, the camera does its job and auto-generates the “capture” specifications and the “when” with the date/time (if your camera is set properly!). But you’ll need to fill in the other blanks about who, what, where and why.

The computer allows us to add these fields of keywords to any image. In addition to the camera’s EXIF, two other types you can add with a computer are called IPTC from the 1970s and the newer style XMP developed by Adobe in 2001. These include geographic location, copyright notice, creator, contact info, and of course, captions, among other details.

People tend to prefer the word “tags” because it makes you think of price tags or gift tags that are attached to items and give you helpful information such as “This is THAT much?” or “That’s for me?”

In today’s social media-savvy world, we could also think of them a bit like #hashtags, which are primarily found on Instagram and Twitter. If you don’t understand those, don’t stress as this isn’t about that but it may help some of you get a grip on what tags are and why we do it.

Web designers use keywords when creating sites to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Maybe we should call what we’re doing Photo Recall Optimization (PRO)? I know I’d like to be a PRO at it! And with Picasa’s tags and captions, I can be!

TAG, YOU’RE IT
Picasa makes it super easy to add tags to any photo. Just click on the small yellow “tag” icon in the lower right corner of a photo in the editor mode. The right panel now becomes a tag editor window. Type in your words and hit “enter” to have them saved. If you need to delete a tag, click on it to highlight it, then click the small x at the far right.

You can also set up to 10 “quick tags” that you use the most by clicking the tiny orange “gear” logo in that section. These stay at the bottom so you can simply click once to include them without typing anything again. To save you time, the top two spots are reserved for your most-recent tags, unless you opt otherwise.

To be honest, this is one area of Picasa that I think is lacking. The irony of that fact is that Picasa is from Google, THE search engine king! I’d love to see better use of Picasa’s Tags panel by showing more of my tags so I can just click them to apply, or maybe have an alphabetical auto-fill so as I start to type, my choices are filled in fast. And I’d also prefer to have a way to sort them into a hierarchy with categories or grouped by sub-topics such as People, Places, and so on.

Adobe Lightroom offers more advanced tagging features like this. Because I can’t get this level of sorting from my tags in Picasa, I have to be smart about which ones I choose and make sure my captions are complete so they can serve as useful search terms too.

WHAT2TAG
But what, you ask, am I supposed to put down for tags? Good question. There isn’t a right or wrong answer, per se. It’s more of a matter of thinking about how you think. Or more importantly, how you’ll think in the future. Or how you think your loved ones might think.

Before you start typing in text willy-nilly, think for a few minutes about the words you would use to jog your memory when you want to find a photo. Scroll through your photo collection in Picasa for visual cues to start making a list in your head. If you want, you can jot a few notes down on paper but the idea is to get your brain in the right frame of mind.

Remember how we used the 4Ws of Who, What, Where and When when writing captions? These still apply for tags too! Except you don’t have to write full sentences or use punctuation. (If you didn’t, don’t freak out as there is no technical rule regarding this.)

WHODUNNIT
Looking at the WHO category, or PEOPLE for tagging…there are a few key groups such as family, friends, and don’t forget your pets! Family should be specified by first name, although I also suggest using their “title” as well, especially if you have more than one person sharing that name, i.e. grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, son, daughter.

FACE OFF
One fun feature of Picasa (& some other photo managers) is its facial recognition capability that learns and automatically labels faces for who they are! This can reduce the need to have name tags. We will cover this in our next post!

WHATCHA DOIN
This may be one of the biggest, broadest categories of all because it includes the EVENTS like holidays, birthdays, vacations, weddings, and reunions, as well as ACTIVITIES such as camping, swimming, cooking, horseback-riding, bike-riding, etc. As you can see, if you participate in two similar-sounding but vastly different activities, you’ll want to separate them into specific tags. Instead of just using “riding” by itself, you should clarify the type of riding — “horseback-riding” or “bike-riding” or “motorcycle-riding.” Of course, you could still just use “riding” by itself if you also added the other word by itself too — horseback, bike and motorcycle could be search terms. It should work to combine searches such as “bike + riding,” which should give you any pics that match both bike AND riding. Imagine all the verbs you can “do.”

I love this shot of my son bawling from August 2010! You may think that’s odd to say, but if you’re like me, 100% of your photos are of smiling/happy people. Capturing a different emotion (sadness, anger, tantrums, etc. that are typical at the age of 5) gives a unique perspective of reality. And this is all because I wouldn’t let him bring the toad (that’s barely seen inside his hands) home with us to become a pet. Mean Mom! 

SMILING OR CRYING
For most candid camera shots, the people in the photo are likely smiling as we’ve all learned to “say cheese” and “smile for the camera” since childhood. I know there are digital cameras on the market that can detect when everyone in a group is smiling so it snaps the pic real quick. As much as we adore beautiful smiles, chances are that 90% of your photos are of smiling people. Maybe more!

What we don’t usually photograph though is our kids having meltdown moments, tantrums, bawlfests and crybaby sessions. Yet that may be the one shot we’d like to find someday. If you put “smiling” in as a tag, you have a zillion more to tag, and it’s hard to find that special shot someday later. But if you put “crying” or “frowning” as the tag on those few photos, you’d be all set for quickly finding them for the ultimate embarrassment when the perfect time comes.

That said, a pro photographer told a story that he DOES tag his senior portraits as “smiling” because most Moms want a pic of their child smiling and this photog didn’t want to look through the photo shoot to find the few with good smiles. So maybe it’s not such a crazy idea, but for my own use, I’m going to stick to the NON-smiling tags.

DAWN OF A NEW AGE
That’s right. This is the dawn of a new age — the age of organized digital photos! Don’t stacks of older print feel rather prehistoric right now after all this tech talk for a week? Age is an important factor for many of us as Moms trying to sort out our kids’ childhoods.

One helpful idea is to have digital photos tagged as baby, toddler, preschool, elementary, middle-school, high-school, and college. Suppose you wanted to add another level of detail like first-grade, hs-sophomore, college-senior, etc. Just make sure you don’t overlap “senior” to mean the one in high school, college or the old folks! Be more detailed for early childhood with 0-3months, 3-6months, 6-9months, 9-12months, and 1year.

Other than the age of the person in the photo, you could also “age” your time period to a certain decade: 40s, 60s, 80s. But the photo folder date will already be able to give you that information so I don’t think this would be a very helpful tag choice.

TIME WILL TELL
You may wish to add a tag to describe the relative time of day the photo was taken too. Although I think this could become overkill in a hurry if you listed day/night or am/pm or morning/evening/noon. I can see the point for sunrise and sunset though as sometimes you want to find a specific shot for that. But these aren’t as critical as the other tags so only do this if you can justify that it matters to you and your future searching ability. I won’t ask for proof but you’ll know best.

WHERERU
The 4th W of Where would be the PLACE tag. Of course, you can label the locations of your photos in Picasa’s tag editor. There are so many places you may want to include in your list though — home, school, work, church, park, backyard and restaurant usually apply to all of us. Then there’s the zoo, park, daycare, farm, starbucks, ocean, beach, cruise, disney, vegas, etc. You will have to determine how many of these you intend to include and it really only matters if you would ever possibly want to search for the photo by that term or sort these matching photos into a new group.

For example, say you go to a certain spot several times on different occasions. Yet you’d like to maybe see ALL your photos from that place in one group. If that’s the case, you’d better make it a tag.

GEOTAG = METADATA MAP
On that same topic, there’s another field of metadata for location information that can be as specific as latitude and longitude coordinates, or just search for it on a Google map to have it tied to your photos that were taken there.

If you travel, it can be fascinating to see your photos on a map. If you don’t leave the state much, you can probably skip this step! But seriously folks, get outta Dodge once! There’s a whole wide world out there waiting to be explored — and photographed!

Adding a geotag is also easy in Picasa. With one or more photos selected, click on the small red thumbtack “place” icon to load the Places Panel. From there you can search for an address or simply click on the map to place the dot. It will ask you if you’d like to place the photo(s) there. You can click yes to confirm, no to cancel or move the pinpoint as needed. The fastest way is to select multiples, of course.

GENERIC SEARCH TERMS
Depending on what types of photos exist in your collection and what you intend to do with them, you may find it helpful to include other generic search terms such as: landscape, scenery, nature, landscape (just make sure it refers to photos of the terrain; not all horizontal photos!), and portrait (close-up photo of a person not all vertical photos!). If you tend to take a lot of food & drink photos for Instagram, maybe you should have separate “food” and “drink” tags, although I’m guessing you could group these together as “food & drink” too.

SPECIFIC SEARCH TERMS
Now you’ll need to think about your life and photos specifically. What words are common in your family that might be useful for searching/sorting later? If your child likes to make Lego creations like mine did, you may have quite a few photos of various structures and playtime. In that case, adding the tag “Lego” might prove wise if you’d like to just search to pull up all Lego photos someday.

What about weather? Depending on where you live, you may want to add a term or two. For example, living in Vegas, where it rarely rains or snows, I would be able to tag select photos with “rain” or “snow.” But it would be ridiculous to tag all the rest “sunny” since there are so many of those! Although maybe folks in Seattle would say the opposite — they’ll tag “sunny” because it’s more rare and leave “rainy” as a regular term.

If you take quite a few pics of fireworks, the moon, clouds or whatever you “obsession” seems to be, definitely make a tag for it and use it consistently in the future too.

INHERENT INFO
In Picasa, the far right column can become a panel of information for PEOPLE/FACES (mug shot icon), PLACES/MAPS (red thumbtack icon), TAGS/KEYWORDS (yellow tag icon), and PROPERTIES/INFO (i in blue circle). Just click through these to see various dates and details that are part of your photos metadata. The last panel for Properties will give you a long list of info you probably didn’t know even existed on every image, even ones shot by your smartphone camera!

DAY 7 — 15 MINUTES. METATAG MARVEL.

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and open Picasa. Navigate to your most-recent photo month/event folder. While viewing the thumbnails in the Library view, select multiple photos* that will have the same batch of basic keywords. Usually you can apply most of the tags to the whole group of pics, and then specify further details from there. This makes it quite easy to add the keywords to all those photos without doing it individually for each one!

*How to select multiple files at once: MAC: Click & hold down the SHIFT key, then click on the first item in the list so it’s highlighted. Now go to the last item of the group (all in a row), you’d like to pick & click that one. Every image in between the two you clicked on is now highlighted.

A good example would be a grouping of vacation pictures. They can all be tagged “vacation” and maybe “travel” and possibly “springbreak” or “summer,” depending when you went. Add in a location tag of whatever state you visited at least; city too if it’s major enough you might sort by that term someday. You’ll then want to mark them with whatever other terms you might want to find later: mountain, tree, sunset, red (colors), purple dress (fashion), sailing (activity), etc.

TAGGING TIPS: 

• Use only singular words whenever possible.
  (mountain, tree, flower, birthday — not mountains, trees, flowers, birthdays)
• Remember (or write down) a list of the words you choose for consistency
• Only use lowercase unless it’s a proper city/state or name
• Save specific locations for geotag (Places) 
• Use facial recognition for People & turn on Name Tags feature for your photos with faces

In summary, your DAY 7 DUTIES:

1. OPEN PICASA & VIEW YOUR MOST-RECENT PHOTO FOLDER (2015-03) IN THE LIBRARY. 
2. SELECT THE LARGEST BATCH OF MULTIPLE PHOTOS THAT YOU CAN APPLY MANY OF THE SAME TAGS.
3. CLICK THE SMALL YELLOW TAG ICON TO OPEN THE TAG PANEL.
4. WRITE YOUR TAGS & SAVE THEM TO YOUR PHOTOS.
5. SAVE SOME “QUICK TAGS” TO SPEED UP YOUR TAGGIN.
6. GO BACK THROUGH ALL PHOTOS (START WITH STARS). TRY TO KEEP TAGGING ALL 2015 PHOTOS AS YOU IMPORT OR DURING THE EDITING PHASE WHEN YOU CAPTION.
7. TAG PAST YEAR’S PICS (STARS FIRST, THEN THE REST) AS YOU HAVE TIME.

WHOA WARNING
Places (Geotags) & People (Faces) can be handled separately in Picasa if you prefer. Decide whether you’ll use the distinct metadata features for this information or whether you want it all to be in the same tags/keywords field. Personally, I’d use the options that the software allows wherever possible. These are far more visually appealing and offer additional search capability than the standard text-only tags.

TALKING TIME LIMITS
Not gonna lie. This can take a while. If you get carried away tagging, this may suck you in. Don’t let it. Remember, this step is NOT the most important. If you’ve sorted your photos into the well-named folders and captioned your photos with searchable words, you are already miles ahead when it comes to finding the photos you want faster in the future. Do a few tags for what you think might be helpful and let it go. You can always come back to tagging at a later date if you feel the urge. If you do, just remember to sync or update your backups so those images have the tags you added.

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Spring Fling Digital Photo Organizing Challenge #15in15in2015 (Day 6: Captions)

1000 WORDS
A photo is worth a thousand words. We all know that famous quote yet do we really believe it and accept it as truth? Does that mean we don’t need to write down anything about our pictures because we’ll just “know.”

What’s Your Story? Do your photos tell 1000 words? Or do you need to write maybe 10 to leave a lasting memory?

We’d love to think we’ll always remember everything down to every last detail. Yet the older we get, the more the reality of fading and forgotten memories makes us realize writing down a few details might be a better way to preserve the stories behind the photos.

We shouldn’t feel bad about this fact. I mean really, most of us depend on to-do lists and grocery lists without scoffing at one another for a lack of brainpower. So why should we feel inadequate somehow for writing down a few words about our photos? Just. In. Case.

As anyone who has lost a loved one too soon, or endured a family member suffering with Alzheimer’s or dementia, you just never know “when” will be too late to ask about “the time when” or “tell me about this picture” or “who is this?”

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 “Safeguard your yesterdays for tomorrow by capturing your present today.”
~ Brenda Kruse, PhotoOrganizingPro.com

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By recording the seemingly simple and small details of your daily life now, you’re making it much easier on yourself — and your legacy (future generations) — to know why you took that particular photo, why you kept it, and why it mattered so much.

The secret to all that? Words, or the story.

And don’t instantly get your feathers ruffled, underwear in a bunch, ire up…by whining “but Brenda, I’m not a writer, I can’t write, I’m not good at words, I don’t know what to say,” etc. excuses. I say, “baloney!”

WRITE ON
No one is asking (or expecting) you to write the next best-selling novel. Or viral blog post. Maybe you’ll be the only person who ever reads it anyway. The point is to put something down on “paper.” Well, I don’t actually mean paper or print, I mean as a digital CAPTION that becomes metadata that stays with your image file. Read this (I am a writer!) and repeat it until you believe it!

In Picasa (my preferred photo management program & hopefully now yours as well), captions are easy to create. Simply click in the space below the photo and type what you want. It auto-saves as you either click enter or move to the next pic. The best part is that every word is searchable so you’ve just made it easier to find the photo (like keyword/tags, which we’ll cover tomorrow). And all this VIP info is stored with the image itself, meaning it will export and transfer to any other program as needed.

Captions can be printed when you print the photo (not straight-forward but there are ways). They also appear in slideshows on Google+ (or you can turn them off). They can display with your photos when uploaded to Web Albums too. You can also turn them on in the Library view to show below the thumbnails.

PRIORITIZE PICS
Typing up even a simple caption may seem time-consuming when facing a backlog of your entire photo collection but I recommend you start from today and start with the stars! In other words, view your “all stars” and look at the most-recent photos first. Add captions there as you see fit. If you never get around to captioning your “other” photos, at least you’ve done your all-time favorites. Those are the ones you said mean the most to you anyway so those should be your first for saving the story.

“Put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting anyone else.” ~ Flight Attendant

This reminds me of what the flight attendants say on a plane in the case of an emergency and the oxygen mask drops from the ceiling compartment, put yours on first before assisting a child or anyone else. So these are your ultimate “me” photos…your oxygen mask moments.

Then you can move on to doing the others. And yes, you can copy and paste one caption to others, although this isn’t the ideal way to provide information. If you simply need to identify basic facts, the keywords/tags feature will likely be more appropriate. We’re covering that tomorrow so maybe wait and see on some of your “Disneyland Spring Break 2012” captions you thought you’d type. Instead, tell us about the tantrum your son threw when he couldn’t get the light saber sucker or how your daughter turned green after riding Mickey’s Fun Wheel or how long you waited for the Cars ride.

NOT JUST THE FACTS, MA’AM
When I say write captions, I mean more of the background story or an interesting tidbit about the moment that isn’t obvious from the visual. Not just some of the more literal things we can deduce from either seeing the photo or knowing which file folder it came from with its date and event label.

In other words, don’t bother putting a caption of “zoo sign” on a photo of a sign at the front of a zoo you visited. I’m pretty sure your future offspring should be able to figure that out without your “helpful” hint. One you way you should plan to help them is to explain why you went to the zoo. School field trip, vacation, local excursion, your kid wouldn’t stop talking about polar bears one summer, or whatever it is. You’ll be able to use metadata keywords and geotags to identify the location and other specifics so that won’t be needed in your caption although you could add it now as long as you include the additional details as well — not just the facts, ma’am!

TELLING A STORY “DOWN THE LINE”
Consider the old-time game of “telephone” for a minute. I’m too young to have ever played it but am familiar with the concept. You tell one person a story and then that person calls another person to tell them what you said. Keep the chain going and then see if the story even resembles the original when it’s told back to the original author! Kinda like gossip!

Same goes for your photos and the stories behind them. One person might tell the story one way; another leaves out one detail and adds in two more. Someone else might go off on a tangent about another aspect that’s not really related to this photo but reminds them of this other story. See what I mean? This is why you need to write down the stories and memories YOU want to save and share as captions. Even if they end up being little blurbs for the most part, they will add a little extra information, personality, character, and point-of-view to the photo.

Remember the old print photos of our past that we all have (or have inherited)? The ones when past generations actually wrote on the backs of photo prints? That little detail or description is now a cherished caption as it tells us what, many times, the people pictured cannot as they are no longer with us.

Of course, those hand-written captions were a little more awesome because they were just that — hand-written snippets of their signature style that we now treasure. Sadly, your Picasa captions will not give future generations that same warm-fuzzy feeling but they’ll be grateful you wrote anything at all!

What story does the above photo tell? Besides it’s the 70s?! Bet you’re not sure. Luckily the back had this CAPTION (in my Mom’s handwriting): “Brenda & Shane are taking lessons from Steve on how to make funny faces. February or March 1974.” That means I was a little over 2 years old sitting on the kitchen table with my slightly younger cousin while my dad made us laugh by making funny faces, probably after he came in from doing chores at night. This is from the old farmhouse in NW IA. 

Enough lecture on why it’s so important and why you need to stop complaining and just start typing. Turn on your 15-minute timer and crank out some captions! You can always go back to edit or embellish later. Get something down for each “starred” favorite photo in your collection and you’ll be so thankful someday. You can send me a nice note then.

DAY 6: 15 MINUTES. CAPTAIN CAPTION!

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and open Picasa. Click on the top filter to “show starred photos only” then look at your most-recent photo folder (probably 2015-03). These will be easier to caption because they are most fresh in your mind.

In the library, double-click to open the first one in the editing mode. Underneath it, click the “Make a caption!” text and type in your own. Click enter to see it “saved” on that photo or just hit the next arrow at the top to advance to the next starred photo in the folder.

As you go back in time through your collection, you will realize it’s more difficult to remember the specifics and the stories that go with some older photos. Those memories are already fading! Write what you can and if possible, jot a note in it to ask another person to share their story about the photo. This works for a spouse, child, sibling or someone else who was also there at that time or maybe remembers the stories you once told about this photo. Sharing your stories verbally is important but putting them in print is priceless. I’ll be showing some great options for taking “the next steps” with your photos for sharing and saving them!

In summary, your DAY 6 DUTIES:

1. OPEN PICASA & FILTER BY “ALL STARS,” THEN START WITH YOUR MOST-RECENT PHOTO FOLDER (2015-03).
2. DOUBLE-CLICK THE FIRST PIC TO OPEN IT IN THE EDITOR.
3. UNDERNEATH THE PHOTO, WRITE YOUR OWN TEXT IN THE “MAKE A CAPTION!” SPACE AND CLICK ENTER WHEN DONE.
4. CLICK THE FORWARD ARROW AT THE TOP CENTER TO ADVANCE TO THE NEXT STARRED PHOTO AND REPEAT THIS PROCESS UNTIL ALL YOUR FAVORITE PHOTOS HAVE BEEN CAPTIONED.
5. IF YOU HAD FUN WITH THAT AND WANT TO KEEP WORKING, FEEL FREE TO OPEN YOUR MOST-RECENT FOLDER (2015-03), CLICK “VIEW ALL” AND ADD CAPTIONS TO ALL YOUR OTHER PHOTOS. WORK BACK TO DO THEM ALL IF YOU CHOOSE.

WHOA WARNING
By their original intent, captions were designed to be relatively brief, extending about the length/width of your photo (if horizontal). Think about how captions provide details next to photos in articles found in newspapers and magazines. These “cutlines” sometimes simply summarize; others they offer unique details specific to the image shown. Picasa will allow longer text and simply continues your text onto another line (or more) so feel free to write out the story as you wish without editing it to fit a certain limit. I wouldn’t worry much about a caption that takes up two lines. That said, you would not be able to print a long-copy caption on the photo very easily and it may not display well on slideshows and mobile devices, but the point is to preserve the information along with the image first and foremost. Write on!

TALKING TIME LIMITS
Captions shouldn’t take long to type up unless you are a hunt-and-pack typist. If you are, maybe it’d be more efficient to have someone faster type while you speak what you want instead. It’s up to you but if you know someone who would make a great teammate for this process, ask for their assistance. In all reality, it really doesn’t matter much if your captions have poor grammar or typos in them so don’t stress about being graded. The only thing that might give you a little grief would be a typo in a caption if you tried to search for that word because Picasa wouldn’t include in its search results the photo with the misspelled word in the caption. Remember, spelling cownts.

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Spring Fling Digital Photo Organizing Challenge #15in15in2015 (Day 4: DELETE & EDIT!)

DIGITAL DILEMMA — SHOOT FIRST, NEVER PRINT LATER
Part of the problems posed with digital photography —hoarding on our hard drives — is that we are no longer limited by a roll of film with a specific number of exposures. We don’t have to stop! (Well, some of us who run out of memory on our iPhones do!)

We definitely shoot faster than we print in today’s world. Back in the days of film, it was a 1-to-1 ratio. You took the photo and you printed it. Heck, you probably printed two of every picture because they always had a deal on doubles! Now you take a ton of digital photos, knowing full well that 99.9% of them will never (ever) be printed onto paper.

Sure, you can start printing all your digital pictures. But that leads to the former well-known definition of physical hoarding and clutter because now you’d have photo albums filling bookshelves and stuck under beds. Who are we trying to kid? If you printed all the digital photos you take, you’d probably have all those photo prints filling Amazon cardboard boxes because they never quite made it into photo albums, right? Hey, no judging, no shame.

Maybe the photos you printed are sitting inside same boxes that also hold the special new Project Life scrapbook photo album you ordered online from Amazon with the best intentions to fill them fast and finally get “caught up.” Yeah, so that happens. You’re not alone. I hear it all the time.

Trust me, printing all your photos as 4×6 prints is NOT the wisest solution in the end either. I didn’t say I don’t suggest printing. Not at all. Just not ALL of them. We will talk more about printing options before our two weeks are up so let’s first focus on dealing with our overwhelming digital dilemma.

DIGITAL DILEMMA — MORE THAN ONE KID
Okay, I’m not exactly promoting the fact that “only children” are the solution to digital photo organization. I’m just saying that if you have more than one kid you likely suffer from what once was termed “Double Print Syndrome.” Because any photo that includes more than one of your kiddos faces will have to be printed twice so you can put it both kids’ piles. I can see all you Moms of siblings nodding your heads at this logic.

It’s the same concept for digital, minus the printing. You’d think you would need to duplicate, or copy, the image so it can go into two folders labeled for each child. But please don’t! This concept not only doubles your workload but it also can cut your hard drive space in half! Not a wise move on either side of the coin. I’ll give you alternative ways to assign that information to the one JPG. Think of it like a photo on Facebook that you tag with the names of everyone pictured and that data is saved along with the image so you can see it later. Or forever if we’re talking about Facebook, right?

DIGITAL DILEMMA — “MISCELLANEOUS” IS NEVER A GOOD NAME
We just spent a whole blog post or two on naming files and folders. It’s that important. And let me just tell you that “Miscellaneous” is NEVER a good name for a folder. The same goes for “etc” or “other” or any alternative word that doesn’t really describe anything specific. You may as well call it LATER because all you’ve done is delay the decision-making needed to label these photos clearly or sub-divide them into sorted folders that can be named.

DIGITAL DILEMMA — “HOMELESS” PHOTOS DON’T FIT ANY CATEGORIES
But what about all those so-called “homeless” photos that don’t seem to fit into any of your existing categories? Do they just end up loose as random leftovers scattered inside folders here and there? If you really can’t identify what a batch of photos could be called, are they important enough to keep? If you still say yes to these pics, then I recommend having a maximum of one folder for each month that is named YEAR-MO-GENERAL to hold what’s left of the non-labeled pre-sorted photos. Some people prefer to have everything neatly placed inside folders. Or if this doesn’t sound like you, just let them be by themselves inside your YEAR-MO folder. For those of you already lost as to why I shortened “MONTH” to “MO,” it’s to remind you that we want a 02-digit month so your computer displays them in order. Smiley face stickers and high fives for those of you who picked up on that subtle hint!

DIGITAL DILEMMA — UNKNOWN UPLOAD-DATED FOLDERS
When you upload photos, maybe your camera or digital device and photo software automatically creates a folder on your hard drive with that day’s date. While you’d first think this is a definite advantage in that it handles date-labeling for you, it doesn’t solve everything because your folder most likely includes a larger batch of photos that are much older than today’s upload date.

For example, let’s say you upload photos the morning of April 1 (no joking!). Chances are, the photos are technically all taken in March, right? And if you don’t regularly download your photos off your camera’s memory card, you might be copying pictures from back in 2014, maybe from Christmas or even earlier. See how the 2015-04-01 folder date would be misleading in this case?

DELETE THE DUDS & DUPLICATES
This part is fun. Well, not at first. Why is it so hard to hit delete sometimes? I think it’s a little like taking a 4×6 printed photograph, crumpling it up, then shredding it into pieces and throwing it into the smelliest, ickiest dumpster that’s going to be picked up by the garbage truck within 30 seconds. It seems so harsh and so final. If you have doubts that you may someday question your deletion efforts, you may be paralyzed with fear, choosing not to delete now. But by delaying your deletion decision too many times, the JPGs begin to pile up quickly.

Your mission today is to start from your most recent photo folders (and then work your way back in time). Open whatever photo viewer you like on your computer so you can see the image in full-size. Look quickly and make a gut instinct decision if it’s a great (or at least good if it’s the only one of its kind) photo. If you absolutely don’t like it (or need it preserved), please hit the DELETE key or trash it. And move on to the next.

Easy ones to ditch are the “finger in front of the lens,” “pitch black lens cap still on,” “blurry/out of focus (unless intentional), “your feet or the ground (if not planned or a successful accident), “unflattering up-your-nose selfie views,” and so on.

PICTURE PLAYOFFS
If you’ve taken multiple shots — and if you have kids, it’s a given — study the first shot, then look at the second one to compare it closely. Which one is better? Eyes open or closed? Smiles? Any distracting background or foreground in one vs the other? Zoom in to double-check the details.

Once you pick a winner between those two, send your winner into the next round with the next photo in the series. Keep having them “battle” to determine a winner unless they are different enough to warrant keeping more than one set. For example, the pose and the people are the same but one shot is of everyone smiling nicely and the second shot is the wacky faces one. You’ll probably want to keep both and that’s okay. The end goal is to eliminate the extras, reducing hard drive space and cloud storage costs.

If you photograph toddlers, sports or sunsets, you probably have more “series” or burst photos than any of us. That’s because you must shoot often in hopes of catching the exact perfect instant and you usually don’t know you caught a great shot until after the fact when the action is over and you can analyze the photos afterward. Most of us know to delete the really unflattering, really blurry images of people.

But what about a sunset photo that’s still just as awesome as the ones before or after it? It can be hard to narrow these down unless you are a pro with a trained eye and ruthless regard for reducing image count. If you can cull your choices down and the ones left still tell “the story,” you have enough. If you can’t tell the story of a sunset in fewer than 65 photos, you need help. Enlist a loved one or a good friend you trust to vote. However, you have to agree to let them delete the ones they didn’t choose as the very best. You can’t ask for their input and then veto it! Try to “let it go” and realize that these sunset photos are not as precious to you as ones of your loved ones. If you keep too many sunsets, you won’t have room for your kids or cats. Try to keep things in perspective, people.

NOTE: Speaking of cats…if you’re a curious one, note your hard drive/folder sizes before you start deleting so you can quantify the results of your efforts with real data! You’ll either be amazed or depressed at the results of your efforts. 

Forgot my “real” camera for my son’s basketball game one Saturday morning so I had to shoot with my iPhone. Obviously, I mostly got a lot of pics of blurry players & usually missed the main action. Come Monday, I needed to go back & delete the ones that can’t be salvaged!

DECIDING TO DELETE
Once done with a batch, pick a new month and its sub-folders to view and find delete-able shots. Keep on keepin’ on until you’ve deleted any for-sure duds or duplicates, and eliminated any extras. That includes silly or random reference shots you snapped just to text to a friend or to remember where you parked and no longer need in your own photo collection. Be a little ruthless here and you’ll be grateful when we do the next steps.

Better yet, you need to start doing this shortly after you shoot instead of months later. I’m not saying you have to look and delete right from your phone or camera after you take the pics in that very moment. But usually within a few days, you’ll find some free time to flip through them & compare/decide. If taken on your phone, you may prefer to wait until they are on your larger computer screen to see them better to decide. That’s okay but don’t just keep them all and tell yourself you’ll decide to delete later.

We all know how that ends up, right? You don’t do it because you’ll think you’ll have time another day. Until you’re all set to record your child’s [insert important moment: recital, game, first steps, prom, etc] and your phone/camera memory is full you can’t capture the special moment so you have to suddenly start deleting things in a rush to hopefully make enough room to capture what you can. The added pressure and stress of that moment, nearly (or maybe entirely) missing out on enjoying it (as well as recording it for the child or others to see later), as well as possibly deleting a photo or video you really DID want to keep, plus the sinking feeling of failure at being organized “one of these days” is enough to depress even the perkiest of people. Don’t let this happen to you…ever or again. Don’t delay. Do it today. Download. Delete. Deal, people!

DAY 4: 15 MINUTES: DELETE THE DUDS!

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and open your main photo folder’s most-recent month’s pictures. Use whatever simple picture viewer software you wish (Windows Photo Gallery or Mac Preview or Quick Look) to view each photo and decide if it’s worthy to save or delete. If you have duds, they’re easy to delete. Same goes for duplicates. Compare closely to choose the best and pick your faves. Can’t decide? Ask an unbiased friend to vote but give them the power to delete the ones they say aren’t as awesome as your others. It’s the only way to keep from drowning in a digital sea of JPGs!

In summary, your DAY 4 DUTIES:

1. OPEN YOUR 2015 MONTHLY FOLDERS & VIEW THEM LARGE ENOUGH TO DECIDE TO DELETE OR KEEP EACH PHOTO. 
2. MOVE QUICKLY THROUGH ANY SUB-FOLDERS & THEN WORK BACKWARD THROUGH 2014 & PAST YEARS UNTIL YOU’VE ELIMINATED ANY EXTRAS. 
3. IF YOU SAW ANY PHOTOS THAT NEED EDITING TO BE SAVED, SAVE A COPY OF THE FILE AND RENAME IT WITH “2EDIT” AT THE FRONT OF ITS FILENAME. MAKE SURE IT IS SAVED IN THE SAME LOCATION AS THE ORIGINAL.
4. ONCE YOU’RE DONE DELETING THE DUDS & DUPLICATES, YOU CAN TAKE A DEEP BREATH, CLOSE YOUR EYES & CLICK TO EMPTY THE TRASH! NOW HIGH FIVE YOURSELF FOR DOING “THE DELETE DEED!” 
5. BONUS: IF DELETING WASN’T HARD FOR YOU, FEEL FREE TO TACKLE SOME OF YOUR EDITING & THEN DELETE THE ORIGINAL (IF SATISFIED). IF YOU NEED ASSISTANCE OR ADVICE WITH EDITING, PLEASE WAIT FOR A LATER POST OR GOOGLE IT. 

WHOA WARNING: EDITING ISN’T EVIL
I won’t go into photo editing per se here but the editing process should be part of your photo routine if it’s not yet. I’m not saying you need to overly doctor your pics until they barely resemble the reality that was captured. That artistic effect has its time and place too. I’m suggesting you use editing to enhance and improve so-so photos into awesome photos. Or to save pretty-crappy pics that need help with exposure, red eye, cropping, color correction, saturation or other adjustments.

The best part about photo editing these days is that you do NOT need high-end Photoshop talents to improve a photo. Often the basic editing available in your device will do just fine. Whether that’s a mobile app on your phone or iPad, or a free online browser-based solution like PicMonkey.com, you can take control of your photos to improve the basics, or add fun filters and effects to completely alter the look and feel of your image. You can even add text or art as well to show your creative side.

That said, my number one advice for editing is to first SAVE YOUR ORIGINAL and only edit a copy. This will ensure that if you really mess up in your editing efforts, you’ll at least have the original to revert back to instead. This is only a TEMPORARY step! Once you’ve made your edits and verified that the file is the way you want it (and still at full-size resolution), you are now free to delete the first one.

Please note that your new file will probably have the same filename by default (but with the word copy in it). Edit the name accordingly. It will also update the date to today, but that shouldn’t matter in this case if you make sure it’s located in the correct folder. And yes, sometimes you like the original AND your fancy edited version so keep both. But let’s not get carried away and make TWO VERSIONS of every photo we take, k? We already know we have a problem. Multiplying it does not solve anything! We must DIVIDE! It’s not new math, folks.

The real reason I’m mentioning it now today is that while you are going through each photo in your collection, you can decide right here and now if a photo needs editing. But I’m not talking about the fancy editing for fun effects though. That you can do later on. I’m referring to the “necessary” kind that takes away red eyes or brings a way-too-dark photo into the light. Both will “save” the photo from a sure DELETE.

So while I said to delete with ease, if you find a photo that you really wanted to be decent but isn’t, make a COPY of it. If you want, you can add the word “2EDIT” in front of the existing filename so it will be easy to find again. I don’t suggest taking the time to mess with editing now as you can end up spending hours on three photos if you’re not careful with the clock. Instead, keep doing your “deleting” process and mark your “2EDIT” pics for another 15-minute session either yet tonight or a different day. They’ll be there waiting for you. Organizing and time-management experts advise that you “batch” similar processes to speed up your efficiency of tasks. That’s why I’ve isolated these into small, simple steps instead of taking one folder of photos all the way through an entire workflow process. Now go get busy!

TALKING TIME LIMITS
I’ll admit you can easily get sucked into today’s task. Looking at every photo in your collection may take MUCH longer than 15 minutes. I know it would for me! But you need to be fast, go with your gut and figure out how to quickly decide. Hopefully you’ll get faster and more decisive as you go through your JPGs.

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

DAY 5: ORGANIZE YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOS IN JUST 15 MINUTES IN 15 DAYS IN 2015 (#15IN15IN2015)

Who feels more organized already? You should’ve spent an hour (at least!) on these past four daily tasks so far. Much less than you probably spend watching The Bachelor’s Monday night marathons! And you know for a fact that your time spent dealing with your digital photos is far more useful than watching some dude try to date 15 crazy chicks. After today’s 15-minute session, you’ll be one-third of the way to our grand finale for Valentine’s Day!

PUSH CAME TO SHOVE
Well I let you make it to Day 5 before I asked you what team you were on — PC or MAC. Not that it really matters though, as photo management is a universally compatible problem. But today you’ll be making the official decision of what software program, if any, you are going to use to manage your images. I realize this is a touchy subject and there’s no way to please all of you so please don’t start a fight over this topic in the comments.

Much of it comes down to personal preference and the sheer fact that — whatever you pick — you must use it! Regularly & religiously! If you don’t have a favorite program yet or are willing to explore options, I’ll make recommendations you are welcome to try. But don’t just throw in the towel if you aren’t savvy with a certain photo program I mention. If you already know what you prefer to use, fantastic! Simply use my advice to apply the information to your specific software and all will be well!

AN APPLE A DAY
Here we go down the road of discussing loyalties a bit. I’m a diehard Mac lover and have been since an early age. I own a couple 17-inch MacBook Pro laptops that are older and well-used but have served me well. However, I also own a cheap PC laptop that I use to run my high-speed scanning equipment. And over the years, I’ve had to work on PCs for clients as well. Two years ago, I finally got on the iPhone bandwagon with a 5 and just recently upped the ante with the 6+. Somewhat surprisingly to some, I do not currently own any iPads or tablets so I can’t answer any questions purely specific to those although most of what we’re doing will universally apply to all devices.

ALWAYS ADOBE
First of all, there are image viewers that primarily show you the photo files but don’t often have editing tools or other advanced features. You’ve probably been using an image viewer these past few days. There are two other types of photo software you may have used, or have thought about trying out.

Of course, the number one name when people think of when it comes to photo software is often Adobe Photoshop, which is a high-end photo-editing (manipulation depending how far you take it!) program — NOT a photo management system. Adobe Lightroom is a DAM program. DAM stands for Digital Asset Management — I wasn’t cursing at you! A database-driven photo manager usually offers some degree of editing along with the ability to create, edit and access image metadata, the helpful extra information that stays connected with your photo.

Lightroom is available as boxed software or a digital download for about $150. You can also use its Creative Cloud monthly subscription method to get BOTH Photoshop & Lightroom for only $9.99/month, which is a pretty good deal. But not if you’re never going to learn them as they do have pretty steep learning curves. If you shoot RAW, you’ll want to use Lightroom. (If you think “shooting raw” means you take pictures of carrots, stick with Picasa.) It also offers a more advanced editing palette and additional metadata capability. So if you’re a pro (or a wanna-be pro), you may want to make this leap. If you’re a novice, amateur, beginner, hobbyist or just plain normal person looking for something that won’t require a college degree to master, keep reading…

PICASA FOR ME
Personally and professionally, I pick Picasa for organizing, editing and sharing your photos. Now closely integrated with Google, this free Mac & PC software links well with Google+, Gmail and other Google apps if you are already connected. However, you do not need to have fully explored the Google+ realm to use Picasa. The latest version (3.9) can be downloaded here (http://picasa.google.com/).

Picasa Web Albums are perfect for uploading photos to the cloud for sharing and saving as a backup. Storage is easy enough to manage for archiving and I love that it syncs so if I go back to edit a photo, it will upload the changed version so my online copy stays current without me having to do anything!

The nice thing about Picasa is that it doesn’t store your photos inside the program. It simply displays the ones you tell it to find by searching specific folders on your computer. Of course, you simply need to tell it to look in the PICTURES folder as you just put everything there in nicely organized fashion! Woohoo!

Another cool point is that when you edit a photo in Picasa, your original file stays safe. You can make all the edits you want but they won’t save until you say so. Even then, Picasa makes a new version of the edited photo, leaving the original safe. It knows that many of us tend to get carried away with editing and can’t “undo” enough to start over. So it saves our butt for us automatically. Gotta love that!

WHY NOT IPHOTO
Well, I never really liked how iPhoto seemed to hold my actual photo files hostage in its hidden libraries, among other hiccups, and that led me to migrate to Picasa several years ago and I’ve never looked back.

Now with Apple announcing last summer that it will soon retire iPhoto, I’m even more thrilled with my decision! By the way, Apple also killed off Aperture, the more-pro version meant to battle Adobe’s Lightroom. Both prior Apple photo programs will become the sometime-to-be-released Photos for Mac (the world’s lamest name for a product if you ask me). The promise for an “early 2015” release, which some estimate to be by April, but the latest scoop is questioning even that deadline now.

If you have been using iPhoto and feel confident about it, fantastic! Or if you still want it no matter what I say, then click the app logo to download it now. I wish you luck! When Photos is officially released, I’m sure it will be designed to seamlessly transition your images (and all their metadata) into the new software. So you can choose to wait and see what it’s like or make the move to something else now. Your call. But whatever work you do should be safe if you make the conversion to a system that accepts your current software’s metadata files. Not to scare you, but that’s the key!

If you’re using a different software program that does not play well with others, all your hard work could be wasted if the tags, captions, keywords and such are only specific to that software and will not “stay” with your image when it is exported. Do a little research to ensure that your metadata would make the move too!

I DON’T DO WINDOWS
I did confess I had a PC laptop for my scanners but I only use it as a tool to run the machines. Once the images are scanned, I copy them onto a USB flash drive and plug it into my Macs for importing into Picasa where I go from there. However, I realize that there are probably a few of you PC people who want a Windows solution.

Your “iPhoto” option — as in free, included with every computer — is Windows (Live) Photo Gallery. It will do almost anything Picasa does I’m sure. But again, if there’s a free PC-compatible software program designed specifically for photo management, why wouldn’t you try it? Picasa also works well in households with computers (or phones or tablets) on both platforms as it’s universal. Learn one and everyone is on the same page.

YOUR FAVORITE STARS
So now that I shared with you my favorite photo management program, I want you to download it (100% free), follow the simple directions to let it load all your images from your PHOTOS folder. It will show all your nicely labeled & organized year, month & event sub-folders for easy reference.

Then you get to have fun picking YOUR favorites! One cool feature in Picasa (there are many so I may say that often in the next 10 days) is that you can simply STAR a photo as a favorite. You can do this a couple ways from inside Picasa. One by one: as you are viewing a full-size photo, click the star underneath it to apply the “star” favorite tag. Multiples: Shift-select several thumbnails in a folder & then click the star to include them all as favorites.

Why bother you ask? I’ll show you why. At the top center, you’ll see a filters menu that starts with a tiny star. Click it once to “show starred photos only.” It sorts out your faves so you can see (& share) just the ones you love the most. This way you don’t have to delete the others, or copy or paste them into new folders, or anything complicated. Just click “star” & click “view only stars” to narrow it down to the best of the best!

You may think you’d prefer to rank your photos on a numerical scale or a 1 to 5 stars so you can gauge them along a sliding scale. Other programs offer this option and it’s really your choice but for me, it’s an added level of decision complexity. Because if you really think about it, are you going to keep the photos that you would mark as 1s or even 2s? You shouldn’t! Just delete them right on the spot! I doubt you’ll miss them because you really don’t love them enough. It’s okay. They don’t mind.

If you would give your photo 5 stars, it gets a star. If your photos are borderline 3 or 4 stars, they should just stay in the folder as is. They are your “supporting” cast of actors; not the leading stars. It’s that easy.

If you had to try to pick a number between 2, 3 or 4, chances are you’d spend too much time debating it in your head than it needs. And then you’d dread doing this process in the first place. So you’d stop. Not good. That’s why I’m a fan of either YES (star), OK (supporting) or NO (delete). Simple. Gut instinct. Go!

I’m not sure if you had more fun clicking through your pics to hit DELETE or if you’ll enjoy clicking to STAR them instead, I suppose it depends on your personality or mood. I’d assume more happy & positive people prefer the STAR process, and those feeling grumpy or revengeful might get a little satisfaction from hitting DELETE.

Now if you are just reading all of my how-to posts before you actually do any of them, I suppose you could TRY to combine both DELETE & STAR tasks into one step. Although I don’t believe you will work as fast because your brain will be trying to think on extreme opposite ends of the spectrum — finding the very best AND very worst. It might be more productive to give your full focus to either deleting the duds or starring the favorites.

DAY 5: 2/3/15: 15 MINUTES. YOU’RE A STAR! FIND YOUR FAVES!

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and download Picasa to your main computer. Follow the simple instructions to set it up and have it find the photos in your main PHOTOS folder. Once it’s done with that (don’t count this as part of your 15 minutes), open your 2015-01 photo folder (& any event sub-folders if you have them) to view the pics. You can control the size of the thumbnails by using the slider at the bottom right. Or you can double-click to view it at full-size.

Decide if it’s a STAR or not. If so, click the small white star under the photo. It will turn YELLOW!  If you change your mind, simply click it again. White is off. Yellow is on. Use the arrow key at the top center to click to the next photo in your folder and keep moving through your photos this way. No need to spend time now doing any editing, tagging or captions…all that will come in due time…starting tomorrow!

If you don’t need to see them full-size, you can click the STAR to any selected photo in the thumbnail library viewer as well. Should you need to save time and STAR several photos at once, you can select the first one you want, hold down the SHIFT key and click on the last one you want which selects everything in between those two photos. Now when you click star, all of them will be favorited. A more useful shortcut may be the Shift-CMD (MAC) that allows you to select several specific photos that are not all in a row.

Go through as many of your photo folders as you can, working backward in time. There are no rules for how many STARS you can have in a folder, but you should not have all photos be stars! Be a little selective your first time through. Try to choose your best ones that matter the most.

Think about it like this…you’re in an elevator and you want to show someone your favorite photos from this certain folder. You don’t have a lot of time. Which ones do you pick? Now it doesn’t have to be just 3 or even 10 if it’s a folder of 100 photos but it should be a significantly smaller percentage of the total. I don’t want to give you any hard, fast numbers to follow because it’s not about that. It’s about choosing the best photos you love and the ones that best represent an event or moment that you captured in your life. That’s what matters more.

Obviously, as you’re doing this STAR process, if you find a photo (or 2 or 10) that you maybe missed during your DELETION day yesterday, feel free to handle it now. Don’t save it another second! Get rid of it! You can either right-click to choose “delete from disk” or find that option under the FILE menu. But deal with it now while you’re here and have your mind made up.

In summary, your DAY 5 DUTIES:

1. DOWNLOAD PICASA & INSTALL IT FOLLOWING THE SIMPLE STEPS.
2. HAVE IT FIND YOUR PHOTOS INSIDE THE MAIN “PHOTOS” FOLDER WHERE YOU JUST ORGANIZED THEM BY YEAR-MO FOLDERS (& EVENT SUB-FOLDERS IN SOME CASES).
3. OPEN YOUR MOST RECENT PHOTO FOLDER & VIEW THE IMAGES WHILE DECIDING WHICH ONES EARN A STAR (FAVORITE) DESIGNATION.
4. MOVE QUICKLY & WORK BACKWARD IN TIME THROUGH ALL YOUR PHOTOS UNTIL YOU’VE CREATED AN INITIAL HIGHLIGHT REEL OF YOUR WHOLE COLLECTION.
5. REWARD YOURSELF BY CLICKING THE “ALL STARS” FILTER AT THE TOP & NOW FLIP THROUGH EACH FOLDER TO SEE YOUR ONLY BEST PHOTOS. ISN’T THAT AWESOME & TOTALLY WORTH THE EFFORT? YOU GET A GOLD STAR! 

WHOA WARNING
In the end, if you think you have far too many STAR photos in relation to your total photos, you probably got a little too star-happy in your first pass through. That’s okay but now take a second, more-critical look at the ones you starred. Try to be more selective and remove a few stars now that you’ve seen the folder as a whole.

Sometimes you need a second (or third) pass through to really notice the ones that stand out. Those are the ones truly worthy of stars. The others are just supporting cast members. They aren’t bad photos at all — just not THE shots that would crush your soul if they were accidentally deleted and gone for good.

TALKING TIME LIMITS
If you have a zillion photos in your collection, this process could take you more than the 15 minutes, especially if you have to download and install Picasa first. But it is an enjoyable step that you should NOT overlook or skip. Forcing yourself to choose your very best favorite photos will prove priceless in the next 10 days of this process. If it takes you another 15 minutes, so be it. Have fun looking back at your memories & finding your favorites!

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.