How to Protect Your Digital Portraits

You Have Digital Photos. Now What?

You’ve had your photo session, you’ve downloaded your digital photos and the files are sitting in your super cluttered downloads folder.

Now what?

1) Get organized

Have a system in place for saving all of your digital photos on your computer. Do whatever makes it easy for you to go back and find your photos. Here is how I organize mine:

• Pictures folder

  1. Year

  2. Occasion/content

So after I finished with my own son’s newborn photos, I saved them in my picture folder “2020” then created a folder “Baby Jordan.” As the year went on I created a few additional sub folders as I collected different milestones. So I put his newborn photos into subfolder “19 days old” and created folders “First bath” and “First Family Photos.”

So now my folder flow looks like this:

• Pictures>2020>Baby Jordan

  • 19 days old

  • First bath

  • Fist family photos

  • For print (I keep a folder for all the photos I print)

Now when I am looking for any particular photo I have a easy trail to follow without having to remember exactly how I organized it originally.

2) Replicate your organization in a second digital location.

Should your computer break, hard drive fail or come under the misfortune of being stolen you’ll want to have a plan b which could be a:

• External hard drive

  1. Online drive or cloud service

  2. Your spouse's cloud account (if applicable)

If you want to be extra careful you could save your digitals to all of these suggestions. Technology is always changing and no one knows how digital storage will look 20, 30 or 40 years in the future.

When my college laptop died, I lost almost everything. The only photos I still have are

• Printed or

  1. Photos I posted onto Facebook and Tumblr -though now the original file size is greatly reduced.

The ones that I have printed are ones that were my favorites and ones that I enjoy all the time being able to see them. I have some as well on social media, but now to download them and save again the original quality is lost.

3) A note on social media

There is no guarantee any platform will still exist or be supported in the future. I used to be on Vine (comment below if you remember Vine!) and all of those videos I created are lost.

Rare, but also possible, is I’ve also heard of social media influencers having their account shutdown by the platform. So social media photo storage is by no means 100% full proof and should be seen as a temporary way to share your photos. Social media should not be a way you save your photos.

4) Avoid CD disks and thumb drives.

My personal experience is that CD disks and thumb drives are not easy to store properly and they usually junk up my drawers. I really don’t like having clutter I feel like I have to keep even though it’s not serving me well.

I’ve also had CD’s get scratched and thumb drives that have been easily corrupted. If you’ve had better luck over the years maintaining your CD disks and thumb drives then it couldn’t hurt to have a third back-up. But I don’t like them myself and wouldn’t recommend them

5) Finally, and most importantly, print your photos.

A year ago I went to visit my Grandma with my mother and my Auntie. For two days we sat around the dinning room table to open box after box of photo album collected over a lifetime. A couple photos were over 100 years old! It was the only activity we did for my brief visit. I had so much fun and I also learned a lot of family stories I had never heard before.

When I imagine my future grandkids (I hope 🤞) coming to visit me and we decided to look at old family photos I don’t think sitting at a computer all day clicking though my digital storage is going to be the way we do it. I actually have no idea what technology will look like 30 or 40 years from now.

But I can be sure that if I have photo boxes and photo albums I’ll be able to sit on my comfy grandma couch to flip through photos to reflect back on all the different family milestones and memories.

For the here and now, I have printed photos from my wedding, of my kids and our little family throughout our home. It not only creates a sense of belonging and nourishes a hom-ey vibe but it’s the best way for us to enjoy them every day.

All of my digital photos are for backup, but my printed photos are there for me to love.

Was this helpful? Or did this inspire a new idea? Comment below