Organize Your Photos-

Collect your photographs.

Sounds impossible? Find all sources of your print portraits, check drawers, envelopes, boxes, negatives, slides. Get out old albums, scrapbooks, collages, old framed portraits, sports and activity images. Remove anything from the basement or attic. Remember that this is only the collecting step, the goal is to get everything together in one place. Sorting and organizing will happen later.

Find an area to keep your gathered items and allow for a space to keep your work in progress. Find a spare table, bookshelf or storage box.

You may also have old news clippings with images. Gather bins and boxes to help gather everything to get started. 

­­­­­­­­Digital images can be managed on your computer with a hard drive backup, USB or online storage account like Dropbox. Find all your old external hard drives, CD's, USB sticks, memory cards, email images.  Download from your social media accounts but understand these images have been altered from their original state. Check your devices, phones, tablets, computer and digital frames. 

After you have gathered your photos you will want to give consideration to how you will work with the collection. Whether it is wall galleries, books or simply gifting prints to family and future generations, there are many ways to enjoy your photographs!

Action: Collect one source of prints in one area, start with loose prints, for example.

Resource: Where to find your print photographs checklist download

Where to find your digital files checklist download

Find out how to create your own plan for your images in the next blog post...