Digital photographs

iStock.com/seb_ra

This past weekend, I embarked on a project of epic proportions: I started to organize my digital photos. And it is truly epic. You see, I’ve got about 13,000 digital photos to purge, sort, and organize. Eeeeek!!! For years I'd been procrastinating, and I finally got to the point where I'd had enough of the procrastination. I just needed to get started.

So here’s what I did.

I started by figuring out first how I wanted to organize the photos (chronologically) and then I began to sort by year, which was fairly easy since my phone date stamps each file. I created folders for each year and then began sliding the pictures into the appropriate folder. Once I was through sorting by year, I created a folder for each month and separated the pictures into the appropriate month. From there, I created subfolders by trip or activity.

Finally, the hard work began: purging the pictures.

Once I was able to create a separate folder by month and activity and include all of the pictures for each, the task felt much less daunting because I can take it in small doses. One evening, I only worked on purging pictures from my first day in Rome. Another evening, I worked on purging pictures from Paris.

I’m not done with my photo project, but it feels much more manageable to me now. Soon, I’ll get to the point of being able to create a photo book by year - or, in the case of my trip to Europe, I’ll create a photo book specifically for that trip.

Stay tuned for more on photo books in another blog post!