What I Use: Photo Management (Premium)

Last week, I explained how I managed my work-related documents and other files. This week, I’m thinking about something even more important: My family’s memories, in the form of the many photos and personal videos that we’ve made over the years.

As with basic file management, this process has changed with advances in technology, especially cloud-based storage services like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive/Photos. But an added wrinkle is that much of this content pre-dates this digital age, and so I had to scan and organize many paper-based photos as well.

I wrote about that process almost two years ago in my Digital Decluttering series. The short version is that, after years of on-again, off-again scanning of old photos, I decided to actually solve this problem by buying a high-speed photo scanner and getting it done. Within weeks, I had scanned in all of my old photos and had sorted, tagged, and cropped and edited, and then copied most of them---there are always stragglers---to the cloud.

And to be clear, that “sorted, tagged, and cropped and edited” bit is important and can be tedious. Newer photos, like those taken with a smartphone camera, typically include date, time, and location information. And this makes it less important to create some kind of an organizational folder system for containing them since search is so easy.

But older photos, and photos you’ve scanned, don’t have this information. And so you can try to “tag” them, by editing their metadata, or you can simply give in and create some kind of a date-based folder management system for them.

I’ve adopted a hybrid approach, so to speak. And you won’t be surprised to discover that it maps to the way I manage work-related files. That is, older photos are stored in hierarchal, data-based folders. And newer (smartphone-based) photos are simply backed up normally to the cloud---more on that in a moment---and, on occasion, dump copied to folders on my NAS that are somewhat organized.

Let’s look at that more specifically.

On my NAS, there are top-level folders for Documents, Music, Photos, and Videos (and a few others), similar to what I have in the top-level of my OneDrive storage. Under Photos, there is a folder called Photo collection. That folder includes folders for various decades---1960s through 2020s at the moment----plus a few others.

Inside of each decades folder is, of course, a set of year folders. So the 2000s folder has folders for 2001, 2002, and so on, up to 2009.

Looking inside any one of these, you’ll see the way I used to organize photos, before smartphones. There are date-based folders for each event. For example, “2007-01-13 Pennsylvania trip,” “2007-04-06 Mark's 9th birthday party,” and the like. (And each folder obviously contains whatever photos are related to that event.)

Move into the 2010s and things change. In 2013, I switched to using smartphone cameras exclusively, and becau...