Your Step by Step Guide to Backing Up and Organizing Your Photos
Attention anyone who has ever gotten photos taken and lost the files or accidentally deleted them: this article is for you!
Nothing is worse than having awesome photos taken, only to realize you forgot what folder you put them in, if you even remembered to download them after the gallery has expired, or accidentally deleted them.
Follow this step by step guide to downloading, backing up, and organizing your photos after you’ve gotten professional photos taken. Doing each of these steps is the best way to ensure you have downloaded and backed up your photos every time AND you’ll know how to find and easily access your photos whenever you need to use them without worry!
Freak accidents happen. It’s best to be positive that you have multiple back ups of all your final images in case this happens. You can use this backup and organizing method for all of your photos to ensure that you don’t misplace or lose your memorable photos.
Step 1: Download
First and foremost, the minute you receive your gallery of photos in your inbox and relish in the beauty of your hard work and preparation, you want to be sure to download those photos. It can be really tempting to flip through the gallery, exit out of the web page, and say you’ll get around to it later.
Trust me on this, all too often if you don’t download and organize those photos right then and there, you’re going to forget about it.
Step 2: Organize
This is often a step that people miss once they’ve downloaded their photos. Speaking from experience, I didn’t organize my personal photos until after I had a full system in place in my photography business. (I still sometimes don’t fully organize my personal photos and regret it anytime I try to locate them to print, share, or revisit again). I’ve also accidentally deleted photos because they haven’t been organized properly.
Learn from my mistakes and organize your photos.
How to organize your photos
Need help with where to start with organizing your photos on your computer? Here’s how I do it and recommend for others.
Download photos from your online gallery
Plug in a usb or external hard drive* and open the drive in a new folder
(*I use an external hard drive, this one - LaCie, for everything. I don’t store anything on my computer desktop anymore so it keeps the computer drive running faster and never lagging)Drag and drop the photos into your organized folder.
Mark the folder with a color tab, especially for professional photo files so you can easily find it by color when you search for the folder whenever you’re wanting to use the photos again and again.
Here’s the Folder set-up that I use to keep everything organized:
Overall photos folder in your drive, let’s call it “All Photos”
In that folder, create folders by year
Optional: in the year folder, create categories with the year first then the category name. Example: 2021 Trips. Or you can categorize by season (I used to use this method since I can easily remember what season something happened. Totally up to you!
In that folder, create a new folder and name is YYYY-MM-DD then however you want to label your session. Example: 2021/09/22 Apple Picking Adventure
Here’s a screenshot of an example I created for reference:
**This is how I organize my photos and it’s so easy for me to find photos if I’m ever looking for them later down the road. You can organize them however works best for your brain! I’ve developed a method of organizing my files, and do suggest labeling all folders with the full year first, then the month, then the date instead of month first or alphabetizing because they will not show up in chronological order, which is something that is important to me.
Easy access:
You will want to have an easily accessible folder on your computer or hard drive where you can quickly see your photos. This way you will be able to easily access and know exactly where you store the photos you want to post one to social media, use it as a card to send, or to make prints or photo albums with. You want to be sure they’re easy to find and make sure the quality is the size you need (high resolution for printing and social media sized for social media and the web).
More on image sizing here. Your photographer will be able to help to guide you with what you need and typically will provide you with both sizing options for you to have.
Step 3: Backing up photos
This step is very important!
Be sure you have some sort of backup option for your computer (and phone), whether it’s a cloud service, external hard drives, or both (highly recommend both).
As a photographer, I have an extensive backup process to ensure that I can always revive my photos if a drive crashes or if something horrible happens to my computer or gear. I advise everyone to do this so they don’t ever have to worry about losing their precious memories and pictures.
Products I use for backing up computer and phone:
I use LaCie hard drives, Backblaze, Google One and pay for extra storage in the Apple cloud.
Other things to note:
Expiration date
Most, if not all professional photo galleries have an expiration date. If it’s not clear, ask your photographer. But don’t wait until the last minute on that expiration date to download and backup your photos. This way you have time to download, backup, organize, and ask any questions you may have for the photographer if you need it.
Tip: add a reminder or a deadline task in your phone for a few days before the gallery’s expiration date in case you don’t get around to downloading and organizing the photos right when you receive it.
can’t find your photos, here’s what to do.
If, after you’ve downloaded, backed up, and organized your photos, you misplace them or cannot find them, there’s a simple way to locate them.
Use the search bar in your ‘Finder’ or on your desktop!
When you follow a schematic of labeling your photos and folders, it makes your life so much easier in the long run. All you have to do is open the search bar on your computer and type in the name or date of the photos you’re looking for. (If you use a hard drive, make sure that it’s plugged in when you search). This is why I love labeling my folders by both full date (YYYY-MM-DD) and an identifiable, brief description so I can look up whichever I remember if it ever gets lost.
This seems like a lot of work. Why is this important?
Here’s why:
After a certain point, your photographer is no longer responsible for holding onto the photos from your session (be sure to read over the contract between you and your photographer carefully to know how long they hold onto your photos). Especially if you’ve paid money to have your photos taken, this is an efficient way to ensure that you don’t misplace your photos or have them deleted by accident. Trust me, it happens and you don’t want to be in a situation where you can no longer access or recover your beautiful photos.
This is honestly a great practice to get into for all of your photos. You will have a much easier time locating and finding lost photos on your computer or drive and can easily access them by knowing where to find them and what to look up in your search bar.