If you missed my previous post, <a href="http://thehappinessbucket.com/2015/10/16/organizing-physical-photos/">Organizing your Printed Photos</a>, I discussed how I handle our physical hard copy photos, but in this post I want to talk about digital photos.  This is becoming a big problem for many people because we all take many more photos today than we did years ago. Most digital devices have the ability to take photos so not only has the number of photos increased, but we have multiples of the same photo in a number of different places.  It is important that you create a system to handle these photos now before they get any further out of control.<!--more-->

If you had to guess, how many digital photos would you say you have on your smartphone/camera/ipad today?  No cheating come on just guess.  Well, I have to say today my number isn’t nearly as high as it was a month or two ago.  That’s only because I regularly work to declutter my photos.  I would guess most of you have 1000’s of photos on your devices and if you compare your photos with your spouse or family member’s photos, many are probably duplicated.  So, now that we have come to a realization that something needs to happen, lets make a plan to tackle the problem before it gets even bigger!
<h1>Go Through Your Photos</h1>
There are many ways to do this, but I have actually done them three different ways
<ol>
 	<li>I go through them on my mobile device, usually when I’m bored somewhere wasting time;</li>
 	<li>Upload them to your computer and go through them there. This is my preferred method because the screen is bigger and I can see any imperfections in the photo; or</li>
 	<li>You could also upload them to the cloud or to an external hard-drive.</li>
</ol>
There are pros and cons with each of these methods, you just have to use whichever one is easiest and works better for you.  The ultimate goal is for you to go through your photos and eliminate any that are not needed. [Now pause, you know you took 10 photos of the same thing hoping you get that one good picture.  Do you really need the other 9 that didn't make the facebook cut? Delete them...right now]
<h1>Categorizing and Grouping your Photos</h1>
Now, group these photos into logical categories. For me, I have one for my daughter, one for my family, one for my business, etc.  These categories/groups are used through out the year and is in one common place.  My photos and my husband's photos all get copied over to this one location, which makes it easier to eliminate the duplicates and pick our favorites.

The beauty of this common location is that we can adjust to life's happenings.  In fact, after we created our first two books we took a hiatus for no other reason other than we hadn't sat down to do it.  We know when we finally do they will be easy to digest/review and we can either create a number of smaller books or a few big books.  Ultimately, it keeps your photos organized until you are ready to work with them.
<h1>Creating Photo Books</h1>
As I mentioned above, we have created two photo books so far.  The first photo book was created after we got married and I loved it so much that we created one to document our daughter's life from birth to 1 year old.  What we love about these books is that our daughter loves to grab them and talk about the photos and we love doing it as well.  We found that the books are a great way to enjoy our pictures on a regular basis.  We also can give them as gifts to our family, so they have them preserved as well.  If they get damaged for some reason, we can just order a copy or create another one since we have the photos stored by the books the photos are in. This allows us to easily locate a photo if someone sees it in a book and requests a copy.<img class="wp-image-3898 alignright" src="http://ecbiz182.inmotionhosting.com/~thehap27/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/img_5823.jpg?w=300" alt="NCM Photobook" width="242" height="242" />

If you are interested in starting your own photo books, make sure to stay tuned for <a href="http://thehappinessbucket.com/creating-photobooks/">my next post</a>, which will share how I actually corral our photos in preparation for our photo book development.

I hope you found this post helpful and will begin to tackle your own photo book projects soon.  If you need help with your project, contact us for a virtual session or if you are local, we will be happy to provide in-person assistance.

Until the next post, stay happy.