The last Saturday in September is Save Your Photos Day, a day to educate people about ways to organize, share and protect their memories. Week 38 in the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge is all about organizing our photos and preserving our priceless family memories.
This post was originally published in September 2021 and republished in October 2024.
I take a lot of pictures. Despite the views of extreme minimalists, I have a bookshelf full of photo albums that I refuse to declutter. When my daughters were small, I was an avid scrapbooker—carefully documenting every event and milestone in their lives. My girls still love looking through their scrapbooks, seeing pictures and reading stories of them when they were small. I’m so glad I took the time to capture and preserve those memories for them.
Scrapbooking has taken a backseat in recent years. These days, I mostly share my photos on Facebook or Instagram. I have thousands of digital photos on my computer. While I’ve organized them into folders, I’m sure there’s room for improvement.
Are you ready for week 38? Let’s get organizing!
What is the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge?
In this year-long journey, we’re tackling one task at a time with the goal of cleaning up and organizing our homes. If you’ve just joined us, no worries. You can jump right in with this week’s challenge. Just check out the first two posts in the series to download your free checklists.
You can get easy access to all previous weekly posts on the main Decluttering page.
Week 38 – Decluttering and organizing our photos
Like those old photo albums and scrapbooks, I have no intention of destroying or deleting the thousands of digital photos on my computer. The goal for Save Your Photos Day is to make sure they are organized and backed up, and to clean up some duplicates.
This week’s decluttering and organizing tips
Here are my tips and learnings from week 38. I hope they will help you protect and organize your family history.
Back up your photos
This is the most critical tip of all! In these days of digital photos, it’s easy to get complacent about all those digital photos. They’re safe on your phone or computer, right? But what if your device crashes and can’t be restored? What if your device is lost or stolen? What happens to your memories then?
My daughter learned this the hard way when she had to reset here phone. She lost a couple of years of photos and videos. Since then, she backs up her phone in the cloud. It costs a couple of dollars a month but it’s well worth it.
I keep my photos on my OneDrive on my computer—automatically synced and backed up online. As I mentioned last week, it’s worth the $10 a month for the time it saves and the peace of mind it gives me.
Don’t lose your precious memories. Back them up!
Scan old paper photos
If you have old photos taken in the days before digital cameras and smartphones, make it a priority to preserve some of those memories. I’m not suggesting you scan every single photo—it would take me years to do that. But it’s time well spent to scan photos of family events to make sure they’re not lost in the event of fire, flood or other disaster.
I have scanned our wedding photos and photos of the first three years of my older daughter’s life. In addition, I scanned some old family photos like my parents’ and grandparents’ wedding photos and some photos from my childhood.
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Keep your digital photos organized
Last week, we talked about the importance of keeping our other digital files organized. The same goes for our digital photos. The standard file-naming of photos by cameras makes it hard to find a photo of a specific event or place if you have thousands of photos.
Giving each photo a meaningful name would be time-consuming, so it just isn’t practical. Instead, I organize my photos in folders by year. If I have a collection of photos of a specific event or milestone, I put them in a sub-folder and give it a name like “Trip to England 2014 – Harry Potter Tour” that will make it easy to find with a search.
Eliminate duplicates
Back in the days of film cameras and paper photos, we took far fewer photos—not wanting to waste film taking 12 pictures of the same thing. These days, it’s not unusual to have several shots of the same scene. (Read more about the days of film cameras in Clutter Tales – Let’s revive printed photos.)
You can free up space by deleting duplicate photos. These could be identical copies of the same photo, or just multiple shots of the same thing. My philosophy here is “Keep the best and delete the rest.”
What I got rid of
I didn’t take the time to go through every single picture this week. I’ll save that for a retirement project when I have more time on my hands. I did, however, free up some space and clutter by deleting 84 duplicate copies of photos and videos.
2024 Update
It has been three years so I’m rebooting the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge to see how much I can get rid of in 2024.
Going through all my digital photos will be a big project. I’ve made a schedule to get it done over the next few months. It will be a great winter project.
This week, I started out by deleting 296 photos from my iPad. Then I moved on to my laptop where I’m off to a good start from deleting 79 duplicate copies of photos. That’s a total of 375 photos so far. And many more to go.
So that’s week 38 done and it’s the end of our digital decluttering. Next week, we move on to some miscellaneous clothing items like socks, underwear and sleepwear.
If you have friends or family members who could benefit from a little less clutter in their lives, please share this post and spread the word!
Have you ever heard of Save Your Photos Day? How do you keep your photos organized? Tell us your tips below.
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Definitely something need to get a handle on and a very daunting task!
It is daunting. Now that we have smartphones, we take so many pictures. I have a lot of work to do.
I think I have a 52-week challenge ahead of me to find time to scan…scan…scan. Gah! Thanks for the nudge. 🥰🥰🥰
I know! I was looking through some really old photo albums with my daughter the other day and realized how many more old photos I could still scan. One step at a time my friend! 🤗
Thanks for that! Right! 🥰
I teach a class on this very thing through the University of KY’s OLLI program! You all are all on point! Saving, organizing and DOCUMENTING your stories is all so very important! If we don’t, who will? I found Forever.com- a private, cloud storage company which, as a mom of 5 & a photographer with thousands upon thousands of photos, meets my needs perfectly. It was the PRIVACY aspect as well as the fact that they are a one stop home for all my photo needs that sold me. I loved it so much I became an ambassador! If you want to check them out, here’s a link https://forever.com/ambassador/kathylanham They even give you a 2gb account to begin with! Happy decluttering and storing to all!
Thanks for sharing that link. Preserving our memories is so important. When I see the amount of pleasure my daughters get from looking at photos, I realize why I’ve made this a priority over the years.
Great post, Michelle! I am a big photo/video hoarder and keep everything in this huge hard drive. I need to go through it at the end of the year and declutter! What a great idea to scan old photos! Thanks for sharing x
Lynn | https://www.lynnmumbingmejia.com
Thanks Lynn. It’s a big job. The photos I have on my computer are pretty well organized, but I found a bunch of CDs with older photos that I need to load on my computer and back up on my OneDrive. Feels like a good winter project!
I organize my digital photos just like you! I have a folder for each year and then sub-folders with more specific titles.
Well, why am I not surprised to hear that? LOL I find it’s the best way to keep them organized.
😁😁
I have a real issue with duplicates. I used to sync albums to Picassa on Google but also have my phone backing up to Google. So there’s about 3 years of photos where there are two of everything. That’s 1000s of images and I don’t know how to sort through them. The two back up methods have saved with slightly different settings so for each pair there’s a slight difference in file size. I wonder if there’s a digital tool to help me.
I also back up everything to an external hard drive because I’m paranoid about losing things.
Yes, sorting through thousands of photos is definitely a pain. I did a quick search to see if there’s software that can help you and found this:
https://www.techpout.com/best-duplicate-photo-finder-and-cleaner-software/
Not sure if it will help you or not.
I have to keep my digital files organized or it drives me crazy. Searching for something suddenly becomes less of a joy and more of a task, so naming each folder by year and creating subfolders inside it to organize groups of photos further by month and subject is a real help! Backing up also gives me peace of mind, as I do not have to worry about losing everything in one unfortunate disaster.
Thanks for sharing your tips! <3
Thanks Jaya. I have so much more peace of mind since my photos are on OneDrive. Back in the day before we had cloud computing, I used to burn backup copies of my photos on CDs and give them to my mum for safekeeping. It’s so much easier now!
Great tips, Michelle! I am learning that I need to start using my camera again, not my phone, when surrounded by natural beauty, because my (many!) photos take up so much space! I seldom print them out anymore, the thought of which makes me nostalgic. Have a great week, my friend! 🌞
Thanks Lisa. I rarely use my camera these days. My phone is just so convenient and always with me. Now that people no longer print photos, I do worry that we may lose some of our history when people die and their digital photos are deleted.
I was at my mum’s place a couple of months ago and we were going through some really old photos from the early 1900s. It was so wonderful to look at them. My daughters were fascinated by them.
Oh, how I love to look at old photographs! 🌞
I know. I do too! It’s a shame that people rarely print photos any more. My father-in-law said years ago that I was one of the only people who printed photos after digital cameras came out.
I have digital photos everywhere and every time I look for one to share it takes forever to find it! This is a great reminder to finally sit down and get them organized. And your tips are so helpful! And I don’t blame you for keeping all the photos and albums. I have tons that I will never be able to part with. Plus I can pass them on to my daughter later.
Thanks Michelle. It’s time-consuming to organize photos, but the effort is worth it. I still have lots more to do. After I wrote this, I found a bunch of photos that I had burned to CD when I had an older computer with less storage capacity. I need to upload them to my OneDrive so they don’t get lost. Sounds like a good winter project.
I have to say, I miss photographs.
I’ve got several albums and it’s wonderful to look at them from time to time.
I need to back up my digital photos. Thanks for the reminder. 😀
I agree. I also like printed photos. I do look through my albums but I rarely do the same with my digital photos. There has to be a happy medium.