When it comes to storing and organizing digital information, photos are in many ways the elephant in the room.
They’re highly valued and meaningful, yet require a lot of storage space. For many people, photos are probably the earliest experience of having too much digital content to manage.
I first felt this sensation of information overload when I was 17, having received my first digital camera. In a matter of weeks, I had accumulated way too many photos and way too many decisions to make about them.
Since then, I’ve tried everything from manually loading photos onto my hard drive, to managing photos in Facebook albums, to moving photos into iPhoto (Apple’s photo management system), and experimenting with Flickr when it all became cloud-based.
For the last five years, I’ve stuck with one solution I’m confident in and will share with you here. I’ll cover where you should store photos in your Second Brain, how you can organize them, and what to do with your photos so they don’t just collect digital dust, but play a valuable part in your life.
Where to store your photos
Let’s clarify first where photos should NOT go: Your notes app is not the right place to store photos or videos because it’s not made to handle large-sized media (which would generally slow it down).
I keep my photos in Google Photos which means they’re always securely stored in the cloud.
Since I take the majority of my photos on my phone (which is probably true for most people), they’re automatically uploaded and backed up via the Google Photos app.
It’s hard to overstate how dramatically this simplifies a process that used to take hours. If you’re old enough, you’ll recall how you tediously connected a wire from your digital camera to your computer and then manually transferred all these files.
There are a few settings in Google Photos I recommend:
- Turn on “Backup”: That way all photos and videos from your phone are uploaded automatically in the background to the Google Photos account associated with your Gmail address. Even if you lose your phone, your most recent photos will still be preserved in the cloud.
- Choose the Backup quality: I recommend “Storage saver” which stores photos at a slightly reduced quality. That’s usually still more than enough to use your photos for various purposes which we’ll cover later.
- Turn off “Use mobile data to back up photos/videos”: Your photos and videos will only be uploaded when you’re on wifi to save data.
- Turn on “Partner sharing”: This setting automatically shares photos with your significant other so that you don’t have to manually send each other photos.
Note that you’ll likely have to buy additional storage with Google One to be able to store all your photos over many years. You can find the current pricing here.
How to organize your photos
The good news is: You don’t really need to because Google Photos automatically organizes your photos for you in various ways.
By default, you’ll view your photos in an infinite timeline organized by date with the oldest ones at the bottom and the newest ones at the top.
When you select “Explore” in the left sidebar, you’ll find your photos categorized by people and pets, places, and things in the photos (such as food, forests, sunsets, mountains, receipts, etc.)
If you’re looking for a specific photo, I suggest using the search bar and typing in a keyword or location. You’ll be surprised how accurate the search results are.
A more manual way to organize your photos is to curate them into albums (for example, of vacations and celebrations) that you can then share with others via a link Google Photos generates.
Now, the question remains: What should you do with all the photos you’re taking? How can they add beauty and meaning to your life instead of just sitting around on a server somewhere?
Why you should create photo books
Having a concrete project in mind makes it clear and specific what all those photos are for. As with anything, a hands-on project will cut through the noise and make information manageable when it gets overwhelming.
For photos, the project I’ve stuck with for years is creating photo books – simple booklets printed on high-quality paper with a cover.
I’ve done dozens of these books, and they are without exaggeration some of the most meaningful things I’ve ever created.
I keep them on my bookshelf and coffee table and bring them out during holidays and birthdays with my family. They constantly remind us of our favorite memories and times together.
Since I have these books around, my photos are so much more available in our daily life. They make the past more present and vivid. And as a result, I’m more grateful and appreciative and feel closer and more connected to the people in my life.
The few hours it takes me to create photo books easily yield some of the highest ROI for my entire year, which is why I’ve done them for a decade.
In fact, creating a photo book with the best memories of the past year has become a crucial part of my Annual Review process. It’s one of the first things I do because it gives me such a deep sense of perspective.
When you start to consider the goals and projects you’ll take on in a new year, you want to be in the most well-rounded, well-resourced state of mind. You want to feel connected to the things in your life that are good, true, beautiful, and important so that your decisions about the future are rooted in what’s best about the past.
I don’t know of a better way of doing that than reviewing my photos from the past year. By the time I’ve gone through these photos, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for how incredible life is.
How could I not be? Every single photo is proof that the inner critic in my head that’s saying, “You don’t have enough” or “You’re not good enough,” is wrong. By the time I’ve presented it with overwhelming visual evidence of how amazing my life is, that critic is completely silenced.
How to create a photo book the easy way
I’ll now share the process and lessons learned to create an annual photo book with the 100 best photos, highlighting the most important and meaningful moments from a given year.
As for any project, I start by setting constraints to reign in any perfectionistic tendencies and minimize procrastination.
Here are the constraints I set for myself:
- The entire process shouldn’t take more than 3-4 hours.
- I only consider photos taken between January 1st and December 31st of that year.
- I set myself a deadline to get it done which is usually around January 5th.
- I only use photos I’ve taken. (I’m not considering photos that my wife or anyone else has shared with me. That would unnecessarily lengthen the process.)
When you create these rules and boundaries, your likelihood that you’ll actually complete your project increases, which is really the whole point.
Next, I follow these three steps:
1. Take awesome photos
Not surprisingly, the first step is to take photos throughout the year. Over the last decade, I’ve learned a great deal about what makes a “top 100” photo. In turn, that has influenced how many and what kind of photos I take in the first place.
My number one lesson is that I’ve learned to take way fewer photos because I know that usually only one photo from a trip, celebration, or meaningful moment will make it into the photo book.
For example, when we took a trip to Disneyland with the kids, my whole goal was to come away from the day with one good photo. Once I had taken that photo, I put my phone away which allowed me to be more present with my family. I didn’t have the constant pressure to document every single moment, creating the perfect replica of everything that happened that day.
I also tend to take more photos of people and meaningful milestones (such as the moment I held the printed manuscript of my book in hand) and fewer photos of sunsets, fireworks, and random stuff that I know are not going to be important in the future.
2. Choose your best photos and add them to an album
This is the single hardest part for most people. In fact, it’s so hard that most never get past this point.
I choose no more than 100 photos to represent a given year. That’s enough to give an overview of my favorite moments and people but not too much to become overwhelming.
In my first years of creating photo books, I had about 400 photos selected on my first pass. It was a long, excruciating process to cut them down further until I reached my target number.
That’s why you need to embrace imperfection in this process. Remember that you’re not throwing anything away. You’re just elevating and distinguishing a small number of photos for easier access.
I promise that over time, you’ll get much better at making those decisions decisively. In fact, you’ll start to develop an intuition for what a “top 100” photo looks like even as you’re taking it.
I suggest choosing photos for your photo book in passes. Start on January 1st and only move forward, not dwelling on anything you see, moving any photo you think is one of the very best of the year into an album.
I set a timer for the first pass which should take no more than an hour. The second pass should be done in about 10 to 15 minutes. You might need a third pass to reach 100 photos.
Don’t worry too much about organizing them in chronological order, putting photos from the same trip or event together, if someone’s eyes are closed, or if a photo is a bit blurry. In a weird way, these mistakes and imperfections become a cherished part of the memories.
3. Turn the album into a photo book and customize it
Once you have the album with the photos you want in Google Photos, you select “Order photos” and then “Photo book” at the top of the screen.
The great thing about Google Photos is that there are extremely few options for customizing your photo book. All you can do is move the order, change some formatting, add captions, and select the cover image and title.
In the past, I’ve tried to use full-scale publishing software for this but it quickly became overwhelming since there’s way too much control over every little detail. As a result, these projects never saw the light of day.
Next, you’ll choose between two sizes for your photo book. I always go with the smaller, square size, which also means that my photos don’t have to be high resolution to look great.
Hit “buy,” and in a couple of weeks your photo book arrives at your doorstep.
More things you can do to elevate your photos
Creating photo books is not the only way to make your favorite photos more present in your life.
Here are a few more options:
- Make prints and display them in your house or give them away to family members
- Curate a photo slideshow to show at your next family gathering
- Create a photo calendar for the new year
What’s essential for all these creative projects is that they spring from a selection of photos. You can’t do any of this if you have 3,000 of them. No one, not even you will want to look through that many photos.
Distillation is the key to turning your photos into something anyone will ever want to look at and enjoy in any form.
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The post The Ultimate Guide to Storing, Managing, and Enjoying Your Photos appeared first on Forte Labs.
