Saving photos, let alone organizing and backing up your digital photos, can be overwhelming. How many photos are on your phone? 1,500? 5,000? 9,500? Some moms find themselves too busy to take the time to organize and back up photos until it is too late. Photos can accidentally be deleted at any time. The phone might crash or it might get dropped in the ocean on a family vacation. What happens to those cherished photographic memories?
Some Moms do not take very many photos and can scroll back to videos of their 12-year-old’s first steps on their phone, while other moms take so many photos they have to do a monthly photo dump because they fill the phone’s storage. Either way, saving photos captures memories to be enjoyed another day. The dilemma is how and where to save photos.
September – Saving Photos Month
September is Save Your Photos Month. The Photo Managers, formerly the Association of Personal Photo Organizers, first celebrated Save Your Photos Month in 2014. Now, the organization encourages everyone to save and organize their family photos. The Photo Managers offer lots of information, especially during the month of September, teaching family photographers the tools needed to preserve their memories.
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The Photo Managers have a designated website for Save Your Photos Month with free classes to learn to organize, categorize, and curate family photos. Some of the classes for 2022 include: “How to Keep Your Phone Photos Organized,” “How to Select a Photo Organizing System,” and “How to Plan and Preserve Your Digital Legacy.”
Experts from around the world will share 30 mini-classes, tutorials, and live sessions during the month of September. If you find you enjoy photo management, you can become a member of Photo Managers, and take certification classes to become a Photo Manager to help others with their photo organization, too.
Saving Photos with Digital Organization
It’s important to know how to store photos. You should save or back up the photos on your phone. Of course, you can save photos to an external hard drive. You can create a digital family archive categorizing photos by date, location, event, and year. Categorizing photos is a necessity so you can find the photos from your family vacation in 2016 or your daughter’s birthday party photos from two years ago when you want to reminisce about a particular event.
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The question most family photographers seem to ask is: Where can I save my photos forever? The most popular way to save photos today is on cloud storage services like Amazon Photos, Dropbox, Shutterfly, or many others. Amazon Photos features unlimited storage and automatically uploads photos so they are backed up quite quickly. Each of the cloud storage services provides different pros and cons. Some of the free services only offer limited storage. Of course, even on cloud storage services, photos should be categorized and organized so you can find the photos you want to look at or share at any given time.
Saving Photos by Making Photo Books
One way to preserve digital photos is to make photo books. If you have not made a photo book, you totally should. It’s so awesome to see your personal photos printed and bound in book format. It can be a hard-covered book or a soft-covered one. It can be a tiny 5-by-5-inch book or an 11-by-14-inch book with thick pages. There are so many variations.
Your photo book can be an annual family album. Or, you can make a book solely about summer vacation, basketball season, or dance. That’s what makes photo books so special, they are printed books all about you, your family, and your friends – from your photos. They truly bring your photographic memories to life by preserving your photos in print and putting them in a format right at your fingertips.
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There are a variety of online companies where you can make photo books including Shutterfly, Printique, Mixbook, Picaboo, Artifact Uprising, and more. Each company offers its own style of printing and bookbinding. Of course, cost varies according to paper quality, the size of books, the number of pages, etc.
Saving Printed Photos
If you have children who are in their late teens or early 20s, you just might have some printed film photos, too. If your children were born in the digital age, you certainly have some printed film photos from your childhood, and maybe from your parents’ or grandparents’ lives, too. Saving photos is not just about properly storing digital photos, but also about properly preserving printed photos, too. Only archival quality, photo-safe storage boxes and photo albums should be used.
Many of the old magnetic albums have an acidic adhesive that damages photos over time. If you have photos in these types of albums, it is time to remove them. You also can scan printed photos and place them in your digital archive to keep your photos organized and all together.
Saving photos is important to preserving your family’s history. Take the time during National Save Your Photos Month to learn a few new tips about categorizing and saving your photographic memories. If you think you are too busy to ensure the safety of your photos, ask a friend who has lost photos due to a computer crash or does not have any photos from their own childhood, what they think the value of photo preservation should be. Once you start sorting your family photos, it does not seem like work because it’s a continuous journey down memory lane.
Sources: The Photo Managers, National Today.
Photo Credits: Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay.
WANT TO READ MORE?
Check out Daily Mom’s Daily Mom Expert Corner: Photo Collage, Turning your Favorite Photos into Masterpieces Section for more advice, tips, and tricks.
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