Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Organizing our Photos - WOW things have changed

I have spent almost the entire day today with a burst of energy to organize our photos.  In another post I talk about an incredible change that happened when Daddy died.  From that day, I decided to put our photos in albums.  I did not want someone to have to sort through boxes of photos when I die. 

That system worked very well until 2002ish, when digital photography entered our lives.  We have organized digital photos on our hard drive fairly well, by date and month, and thanks to Carbonite, they are backed up so when we lost our hard drive earlier this year, I recovered them all.

When I got my iPAD, the generation before the camera version, I synced a few photo folders to the iPad but not a lot of them.  iTunes is the absolutely worst way to sync photos.  I have been struggling for 2 years with iTunes and the iPad.  I also have photos on my iPhone that I take when I am out and about and don't have a camera available.  I have almost 1500 there.  AND, folks send me photos through the mail, so in my Yahoo mail, I have a folder of pictures.  AND there are some online photo storage apps that I have accounts with where pictures are stored.  AND last year, I worked halfway through our 35MM slides scanning them into digital images.  The other half are waiting for me to scan them.  AND with a camera on your phone and the proliferation of digital images, there are that many more images waiting to be seen and reviewed.

OK, I can blame some of this on technology and some of this on my lifestyle and organization.

This week, I decided to get all my digital photos on my iPad.  I struggled with iTunes, but gave up last night.  Today I purchased Photosync for $1.99 (I don't buy apps that cost more than $2, I am cheap), which I think is going to work and will take some time, but it works.  So while I wait for the most recent batch of Photosync to SYNC, my mind is busy figuring out how to get all of these stored photos together somewhere.  I am not including those in albums just yet, that is for another decade.

This to me is a perfect example of "Technology is great, but sometimes is really complicates things."

4 comments:

Cecilia d'Oliveira said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cecilia d'Oliveira said...

I can't believe this post. I was just thinking about this problem last night. We have all our photos pre-digital time in boxes. Then when digital cameras came in we organized those in folders by date on the home computer, and backed them up regularly. But in the last two years everything has fallen apart because photos are all over the place - Facebook, the iPhone, the kids' computers and phones, etc. What a mess...Glad to hear that you've found a partial solution to your problem.

Always Asking Why said...

and I forgot the pictures in social media like Facebook. YIKES

Always Asking Why said...

Well, I am not going to sync all 24,000 photos. My current strategy is to have a folder on desktop for each year to photosync to my iPad and iPhone

I syncing all my scanned 35 mm slides and will create speciality folders in Picasa

Getting it under control a bit a a time