You might think that creating our bonusprint photo products could be complicated, but it’s actually really straightforward. Our blog has all kinds of tips and hints to help with your photography , but this page is potentially the most important. It might not sound that exciting, but it’s something all the top professional photographers abide by — making sure your photos are organised and backed up properly. We reached out to our colleagues here at bonusprint, all of whom love photography, for their advice on how they keep their photos well organised.
Delete, delete, delete
How many times have you started cleaning up your photos, then wavered about actually deleting the pics and ended up deciding to keep them ‘just in case’? Before you know it, you find you’ve got so many images in your folders that you can’t face the task of sorting through them all. Our colleague, a keen photo book creator, Patrick has a brilliant way of avoiding any future regrets. He simply creates a complete copy of his primary camera roll, which he names ‘Level 2’. Then he sets about ruthlessly deleting everything but his best photos. The primary roll then acts as a full back up, so there’s no risk of losing anything. Patrick reduces his photos so he’s only got about five left each month, which leaves him clutter-free, yet will never regret deleting a photo.
Organise your photos into folders
If you save all of your photos in just one folder, then it soon becomes really hard to find the ones you want for things like photo books, wall art or photo prints. Luckily, our smart phones can help you out a bit as you can search for photos by month or year, but we still suggest you do the heavy edit we mentioned above. Once you’ve done that, there are a couple of ways you can get your photo library in order. When we asked around the office how bonusprint people organise their pics, Lene and Rabea both said that they make sure to keep all their photos sorted by the month they were taken, while Olivia goes even deeper. She ensures all her images are organised by year, but within each year she sorts her photos by events such as birthdays, holidays, weddings, and parties. Then, when she wants to create a yearbook or design some wall art with specific photos, she can find them really easily.
Use your phone photo library wisely
We know that it can be tricky to actually find the time to sit and do a full edit or total reorganisation of your photos. But there are a couple of tricks to doing this on the fly, whether you’re using an iPhone or Android phone. Check out the built-in features your phone has — Sonam loves to use the ‘Favourite pictures’ section as an easy place to find all her, well, favourite pictures. Alan gets his photo inspiration from the folders that his iPhone creates for him. He found that he had enough pictures of him and his mum in the ‘Selfies’ folder to create an entire photo book for a fantastic Mother’s Day present.
Online cloud storage
One thing every single photographer would agree on, is that you absolutely must make sure to constantly back up your photos. Otherwise, one day, you could find you’ve lost your photos forever. The best solution is to make sure you have them backed up separately from your phone or camera on an external hard disk as well as using cloud storage. When we asked around the office about what kind of cloud storage everyone used, both Tristan and Josh vouched for Google Photos. They said that it does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of data labelling. It also has a very powerful search tool, meaning you can find photos by date, people in the pics, locations, and much more. So if you’re making a bonusprint photo book, for instance, all you need to do is a quick search for the people, event or subject you want to feature in the book, create a new folder and copy the search results into it. For more photo storage hints and tips, check out this blog.
We know that photo organising isn’t the most exciting of subjects but it is a really important aspect of photography. Losing all your photos can be so upsetting, and making sure you have copies of them safely stored is great for peace of mind. We hope that this blog has helped you work out how best to keep your photos safe and in a clean, organised library. If you want to find out more about fantastic photo filing, head over to our in-depth blog here. Once you’ve done that, head over to our site and get creating by clicking the button below.