Have you ever wondered how to organize family photos? It could be your own family photos or it could be old ones handed down to you. I have been restoring my family’s old photos for years now by taking the boxes my parents gave me, selecting the best ones, uploading them to Photoshop then printing them!
This is one of my favorite things to do personally as a family photographer. I have spent years nailing down a system for organizing family photos that works for my family. Too many times we post our family photos online and forget about them. It is only when we need them (think high school graduation, funeral etc.) – when we realize the value of them – that we think oh crap where are they?!
I am especially careful about how I organize our family photos and preserve them because I have a daughter who has very few photos of her first three years of life before she joined our family. Believe me, I know the value of having photos.
How To Organize Family Photos Now
There is nothing worse than getting to the end of the year and thinking what have I done with the pictures from the trip you took or the first day back to school. Start organizing your family pictures now. Since I have done this for a while now, I do these first steps at the end of the year so that organizing family albums is easier throughout the coming year.
How to organize your family photos
- Create a yearly folder on your computer. (I name ours “___Year___ Personal Family Portraits”.) This can be stored on your desktop or on a secondary hard drive.
- Create twelve folders by month inside of the yearly folder. (1. January, 2. February…)
- Throughout the year upload images from a vacation, weekend adventure, birthday etc. and create a separate folder for the event, but make sure it is located inside of the folder for that month.
- Backup these folders. (This step can actually come later, but because I would be devastated to lose any of our pictures, I back them up as I go.)
Now for my favorite part – determining what you want to do with the images now! Not all images are created equal. What I mean by that is at the end of the year you will have iPhone pictures of unexpected moments, vacation pictures, daily lifestyle images and then the professional portraits that you know are timeless!
How to preserve your family pictures through albums
- Chatbooks – Our daughters LOVE looking at pictures of our family! They pull out our family albums that we keep on the coffee table DAILY. For iPhone images that I want to keep, vacation trips and all images in between I create an album through Chatbooks! I also have created special chatbooks as a gift for the girls. You can also upload images straight from your phone. If there are photos that are on my computer that I want to include in one of these, I airdrop them to my phone and do it that way. I don’t mind them looking through these over and over because if something happens to one, it can be replaced easily! (Tip – if you have kids, go with the hardcover! We get the 8 x 8 size.)
- Heirloom Album – This is the big boy! This is our professional album that is made to last our lifetime and handed down generations. These are more of an investment, but these will last for GENERATIONS. These are the albums that my photography clients get! In these albums go our professional family portraits we have done each year! (Yes, we have our family portraits done by other photographers every year, too!) I will also sneak in this album a handful of classic images of our family that I took on my big camera throughout the year if I want. I like to keep these very themed (that years family session) and refined.
How To Print Your Family Photos
Lastly, for my most favorite images of the year, I print these out on acid-free archival paper, and store these in a safe, dry place. (I use clear bins from Michaels.)These pictures may also be included in the heirloom album but I go the extra mile for these portraits to keep them safe by printing and storing.
This process may seem time consuming and can be especially if not organized before the new year begins. Yes, it is also an investment. But, it is my thing for my family. I will never pass down a recipe to my family (bahaha!) but documenting our life together is my gift to them that will show more value as time passes.
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