Keeping Track of Pics

You could get an external harddrive for them. That's what I have to free up space on my computer. What I've been trying to do is stop trying to catcvh up with putting them in albums, and as I load them onto the computer, i automatically import them to photobook (free online software you can download) Then while the kids are napping, a couple times a week I put all the ones I want in the book in order, type any little sidenotes, and when that photobook is full, I order and have a hardcopy sent to me without needing to write on them and organize them physically. The photobooks are easier to store than an album, and take up less space. And they are easy and fun to pull out and flip through.

I didn't have time to read all the others, so sorry if this is a repeat. I use the Creative Memories website (http://www.cmphotocenter.com) to back-up all my photos because they have two seperate sites where they store the photos in case there's a problem at one of the sites. Also, I haven't ordered anything in 3 years and they still have all my pics.

As for at home, I have folders for each month and then put those in a folder for the year. An external hard-drive is also a good idea! Best of luck!

N.

Shutterfly! Great, easy, reliable... I think it has more offerings and is easier to use than some of the other sites.
Have fun!

I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to store and organize all of my photos. Your digital camera should automatically be dating the pictures, which is stored in the digital file. Elements will allow you to face tag your photos - so you could easily search for all pictures with a certain individual. It's a very nice system. I organize by year and quarter within Elements and back up quarterly.

Currently, I am using DVD's that I store off-site, but I am looking for an external hard drive to replace the DVD's. Another option to consider, as the storage space becomes less expensive, is jump drives. As they can hold more and more data, this might be a very inexpensive option.

Also - a good book to read is Photo Freedom by Stacy Julian. It's geared towards scrapbookers, but she does have an awesome system for storing and organizing photos. Keep in mind, we are now able to take more photos than ever before - and you don't have to keep the photos that are blurry or where your subject is not looking at the camera, poor composition, etc. Delete the bad photos, otherwise, it will become overwhelming.

You have to think about 1) how worried you are about losing pics, and 2) how convenient you want your system to be. So what works for one may not work for others. That said, here's what I do:
1) When I upload pics from my camera, the pics get stored on my computer in the "pictures" folder. Each upload is saved as a dated subfolder so I can easily find the pics by date.
2) Then I upload my photos to Costco.com photo center, where they store all my photos, too. I chose them because the photos are $.13 and they ship free. I have hard copies shipped to me for my photo albums and scrapbooking.
3) When I get hard copies, one complete set goes into a photo album for "archiving."
4) I also copy the new uploaded folder onto a DVD (they hold more than CDs), for easy loaning or transporting when I need it--also as a back-up.
This whole process takes 10-15 minutes, about 1x/month (about 75 pics each time).

Now, I also have an external hard drive that backs up my entire hard drive, because I have a home-based business and have had to pay a lot of money to recover files after my computer died. So I feel my photos are little "overprotected." But this works for us since we like to look at photo albums, I like to scrap, and it seems like the photos are always where I need them to be electronically. (For example, it's nice having all my photos at Costco.com because when it comes time to make those presents like calendars and mouse pads, etc.)

To REALLY confuse you, I'll say that I also have *some* photos on Flickr.com, for those relatives and friends we don't see often. We don't have a website or blog, so this takes the place of that.

Happy archiving!

There are a lot of neat websites out there. I personally use walgreens.com. Another one that I know a lot of people use is shutterfly. See if your camera will include the date on the picture, that's how I can tell how old my little one is, the date gets printed right on the pic.

A., It sounds like you may have an older computer. I broke down and bought a new Dell laptop this summer for around $600 and the software it came with to organize pictures is fantastic. Not to mention everything else it can do - videos, etc. It organizes my photos and videos by date, and lets you rate pictures so your favorites scroll on your desktop. All the data (data, time, etc) for you (depending on your camera all your old pictures will have the data still as well - mine did). Just wanted to mention that. I still backup all my pictures and video to CD/DVD as well as having them stored on my computer.

Also, I have used the website www.imageevent.com for many years. My family keeps the link and can periodically go out and look at it - they all love it becasue they keep up with my little one's growth that way. I really like this website and the features, but I do pay $25 per year. There are many good free websites availible - picasaweb.google.com, yahoo photos, shutterfly, snapfish. I would suggest to you to pick a website though where people don't have to have a login to visit the site. That is big pet peeve of many if you want others to view your pictures.

Have fun with your project~

I recently became a consultant through Heritage Makers. My website is www.MyPhotobookStory.com.

This is an online tool, and you can organize your pictures by folders and albums. The templates are 100% customizable, and the company adds additional artwork each month. The products are the best quality I've seen.

Watch this 5min video to give you an idea of what we are about! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irdqtq7mF6Y

Please contact me at ____@____.com for more information.

I use Picassa Web Albums. It's free. You can also do some editing on the pictures, which makes it really nice! :)

Congratulations on your little girl!

I use the website snafish.com

It is free, they just require you to makea purchase like once a year. They have the best prices and great specials.

To keep the pictures organized I name the folders by date as I upload the pictures. I have them by year and month.

I burn them to CD's and label them with whichever month/days is on the disc. Then I save one and have it at the house, one at my dads, and (crazy me) in a safety deposit box. I don't want anything to happen to all of the pictures. I am assuming you are using digital. To answer about detailing...When you download your pictures onto the computer, if you put the mouse over the picture it should say the date and time the picture was taken. I assume this is in all softwares for pictures considering it works on my Adobe and Microsoft wizard. This makes it so you don't have to label dates, which then you could do the math later and figure out how old they were. As long as you make sure your camera is always on the right date. Now the people and places in the picture that is up to you! I do a lot of journaling or writing things down on different calendars for each kid. Life gets busy and it is so hard to remember all the lttle things that make us laugh, smile, and cry. It is so easy to just run into their room and right down the funny thing they did that day. Then you can match to pictures and figure it all out. At least that is what I am hoping for years from now! Good Luck!

You are way ahead of most in organizing your pics, so good for you.

And back-ups are a definitely good idea. Recovering your data from a crashed computer is probably a minimum of $1000. (That is what my husband does for a living, so I hear it all the time.)

A. E. I have four different websites for my photos. They are: Kodak, Facebook, MySpace and Picasa. I also have Picasa for my computer and it works great. I also understand about losing all the pictures, my computer crashed one week after I had made a backup disk of all the baby photos. There are still some photos that I will never get back. After that experience I started the other sites and I can still print them and share them with family and friends. Hope that this helps. A. H.

What type of picture software do you have on your computer? My first digital camera was a Kodak, which came with Kodak Easyshare software. While I no longer have a Kodak camera, I am still able to use Easyshare for uploading pictures onto my computer. It automatically makes a new dated folder each time I upload pictures, which is an option you should be able to select using whatever software you have. You need to put the pictures somewhere. Another nice feature about Easyshare is that you can sort by the date the picture was taken.

I also use Picasa for photo editing and web albums. I quickly ran out of space, since Picasa only offers 1 gig of space for free on the web albums. I purchased an additional 10 gigs, which is shared between the Picasa albums and my gmail account, for $20 a year. I have found that Picasa works a lot better for myself and my family to access pictures than the other options I have used (Snapfish and a family website). I also like that I can upload videos onto Picasa for free - Snapfish only does videos for a fee. Unfortunately, Picasa only allows videos of 100 mb or less, so anything larger I have had to put on myspace.

Hope this helps!

I see lots of great advice here but wanted to add a few things. I do photography and make custom scrapbooks and photobooks. It is very important that you have many forms of backup. I backup my computer with an external harddrive and my husband backs us all up with a tape system. I also put all of my photos on CDs but this is temporary measures (most CDs start to "break down" with time...flake etc...). I too use an online site (Kodak, Snapfish, Shutterfly etc...) however if you don't purchase things from them once a year they will erase your photos. You can't completely rely on web services. So, it is also important for you to print these pictures and put them into albums, photo boxes, photobooks, scrapbooks etc... Whatever works for you... but get them printed! Giving copies of photobooks etc... for gifts is a great way to spread your pictures around to so that if for some reason something ever happened to your computer and your home that you could piece some of those memories back together via family.

Im surprised nobody mentioned it but I use Snapfish.com and love it. Our computer recently crashed and I am so thankful for snapfish. It is very inexpensive to order photos from them. They will either mail them to you or you can have Walgreens print them and avoid the shipping fees.

I agree i love kodak gallery. It came free with my camera but i don't know if they charge for other users. It is a great easy site. And each time you upload the album is named and dated so it is easy to find certain pics even though i have over a thousand in my gallery.

Hi A.,
I use Shutterfly, www.shutterfly.com. It's a free website and you can store an unlimited amount of pictures. What I do is when I download my digital pictures onto my camera, I name them the date they were taken. I also separate them on shutterfly usually by date because you can make folders. That way when you get the pictures developed from shutterfly, the name of the picture 'the date' is printed right on the back of the picture. Feel free to email me with any other questions. ____@____.com and good luck

I upload all my pictures to a web site called Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) It's free! You can have pictures and other gifts printed from there, you can crete albums so other people can see your pictures and you can create your own web site of pictures on their site. I've been using them for about 5 years now. I even have a professional gallary there because I sell my pictures.....am the photographer for a racing association. Their customer service is great too!

D.

I used Kodak Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com) and I love it!!

I am in the same boat as you. Right now I use Adobe photoshop on my computer. When I download the pictures to it, the photoshop automatically dates each picture for me so when I print them, the date is on the back of the picture. I don't have time to individually date each on either! The problem is that thanks to the now digital cameras, I take thousands of pictures and want to keep them all, but don't want to print them all out. I've been looking on the internet and found what is called an external hard drive that you can save all your pictures on. Some hold 500,000 pictures, some hold even more depending on the price you want to pay. Then when you want to look at the pictures, it is compatible to connect to any kind of computer or televsion. It seems pretty great. I have heard not to store your pictures on CD's because apparently even CD's will break down after 15 years or so. Even so, I would probably make an extra CD to keep at my mom's house. I found the external hard drives at bestbuy.com if you want to check it out.

Creative Memories has a great software program called Memory Manager that you can store and organize all your digital pics, videos, etc. It has a 'vault' that holds everything and is backed up at regular intervals. The software can also do some picture editing and keep track of which pictures you have printed. I use that and organize everything chronologically and then also back up everything on CD. The CDs I store in my Creative Memories power sort box, which is a photo safe box. You can go to www.creativememories.com to find a consultant near you and they can answer more of your questions and show you other products that might suit your needs. I just love them because everything is archival quality, photo safe and designed to last for generations.

Hi A.!
I don't know if this is the kind of thing that your looking for, and I know that websites can crash also, but I've set up a website for my kids at www.totsites.com. It's an awesome way to share picture's and information about your kids, and the website alerts your contacts (if they so choose)so that they always know when you make changes or add things.
Other than that, I would just transfer all your picture's to CD, so you'll always have them!
Hope this helps!

Yeah, I am subscribed to dropshots. It's an awesome website and the first 500 pictures are free. After that you pay a one time fee of 90.00 or something like that and you post them and alert y our friends pictures are updated and they can go and see them. Very easy to use and secure. I have a bunch of pictures too and I was afraid the computer crashes all of them would get lost. This way that won't happen. I also suggest backing them up on a CD. Good luck.

What I do because I dont trust sites not to crash too, is we store them on the computer and every quarter I burn 2 disc with that qt pics. One disc goes in the cd case I bought only for pic discs and one disc I take to my moms and put in the disc photo album (cd case) I bought for her place. That way if something happened to my house I have a backup at my moms and vise versa also it means that when ever she wants to look at pics she can.

I have mine on the computer--I have one big file of "photos from 2008" and within that file I break it down by month and/or special occasion. I also use "Snapfish" and do the same thing. In addition to that (in the event of a computer crash combined with Snapfish going out of business, which is not likely any time soon), my husband bought a back up hard drive and every few months we back up our newest pictures. I have no idea how to do that part--he hasn't showed me yet! On a side note, I have noticed that when they are saved in the computer and I hover the arrow (mouse) over the picture and keep it there a couple minutes, it will pop up some technical info including the date the photo was taken (of course you camera has to be set accurately!)