Photo Organization

Similar to you, I have my photos organized by year and month. However, I also break it down by phone photos in their own folder and then they're broken down by year, month, then date. That's simply because I transfer photos to my computer every single day, so I certainly did not and would not go back and organize in such a way if I was doing a giant batch of photos. Month and year are enough, IMO, for the daily stuff.

I do have subfolders in those months if there was a big vacation.

Good luck and great job getting this tedious work done!

Lots stay on my phone. When I print them, I usually take them off and put into months in a folder for that year. They are saved in several places. My wildlife photos are taken in the hundreds, so I have 5 sd that get emptied onto my Light Room Classic program and they get culled, enhanced, printed, and saved on LRC and also put onto a photo passport that saves them.

I'm working on this issue right now. My photos are all in the Apple Photos app, and I don't have an organization plan for them at all. They are auto-sorted by year, month, day, so that's fine. I also have random folders like "Crop and Create" for the photos that I want to use for the next Crop and Create - folders that I create when I have an immediate need.

I signed up for Backup Bootcamp (Miss Freddy website), so I'm hoping that helps with a plan. Right now I'm working on pulling all digital photos onto one External Hard Drive. That alone is a big project for me.

My biggest challenge is finding photos for scrapbooking, so that's how I will approach my organization.

If I think about the way I scrap, it's usually to match photos and paper, so I think I'll create folders going forward for the various seasons that I like to scrap - for instance, I'm always looking for Fall photos, so I'll put all of those together in one big Smart Folder (certain dates automatically go into that folder, like Sept-November), Vacations we've been on will each have their own folder, portraits of my son will have it's own folder (this would just be any photo of just him where he's looking at the camera), and I'll just continue to create folders by topic that I know I'll think of when I want to go scrapbook. Kind of like organizing your house by putting things where you would first think to look for them, those are the folders I'll create.

I have shared this before, so apologies if you've already seen it.

have a folder for each year. Inside that folder are sub folders for any outing / trip / event for which I have multiple photos. These folders are sorted into date order YYMMDD. When I have scrapped that particular event, I change the folder view from a blue folder to one of the photos inside that folder. That way I can quickly see which photos I still need to scrap. This is what the folders look like: 





Any single / random photos are in a folder named YYYY Misc Photos, and the photos in the miscellaneous folder are renamed to be in YYMMDD order, with a brief description of what the photo is. This helps if I need to search for a particular photo.




Even though I am an untidy person, by photos are meticulously organised. And I don't leave photos on my phone - they usually get uploaded to my iCloud every few days.

Oh, and one last thing, that I mention so often here I should make a recording ..... DO NOT trust external hard drives!! If you have all of your photos saved to just one hard drive, you are asking for trouble. Over the years, I have had five EHDs die on me. Luckily I knew the risks, so I always had two hard drives on the go at once, and as soon as one died, I would replace it. These days I pay for 2TB iCloud storage.

Mine are a disaster. Although, at the beginning of the year I did get my digital pics from about 2010-2024 all onto one external hard drive. Just not in any kind of order.

When the cold weather comes back around, I'll get back to organizing them.

I have mine stored on Google Drive. I have them sorted by event and then year (if needed). So I have a folder for 4th of July, then in that folder there are folders for each year. For my Disney photos (we are passholders) I have a folder for each part and then inside that folder they are sorted by date. I have a video on my channel if you would like more details.
youtu.be/oknaTcEnYwU

My photos auto-upload to the Cloud, and I download a copy back to my laptop, and organize them loosely by year in folders, but I may have 5 or 6 folders for the year, like 2024 Jan - March, 2024 - April - June, 2024 Vacation to Alaska, 2024 Grandson, 2024 Christmas, etc.  The reasons for this type folder organization is that I'm at a stage in my life (children grown, no small grandkids, retired, one big trip a year), that there are months with only a few photos that are scrap-worthy, and there are events, like vacations, where I might have 500 photos from 2 weeks, so some months don't need their own folder, but there are events that do need one, so my folder organization fits where I am in life. 

About once a year I order prints of any photos (events) I plan to scrap (although I probably order about 2 to 3 times as many as I need because I don't know exactly which photos I will scrap until I actually create the pages). The printed photos are stored in chronological order in photo boxes. Sometimes I add notes in with the photos or I store notes about the events in a notebook or spreadsheet to help with dates, names, journaling when I create the pages.