Today’s consumer spends an inordinate amount of time taking pictures and videos and sharing them across a spectrum of social networks. Over time, consumers create a body of work that at some point will get out of hand.
There will be videos and photos on your smartphone, camcorder and regular camera. Of course, days add up to weeks; weeks up to months; and, months up to years. This translates into thousands of digital memories in a variety of places that are unorganized and at times very hard to find.
To help prevent digital organization headaches, here are a few tips:
Find A Home for Those Memories
Our smartphones, memory cards and computers can only hold so many pictures and videos. External hard drives are a great way to eliminate digital clutter, especially those with USB 3.0 technology. Take a look at the Western Digital My Passport 2TB hard drive. It’s compact and packs a ton of space for roughly $300. Best part, it’ll allow you to have all your digital memories in one location that’s portable if it needs to be.
File Organization Should be a Priority
Once you have your external hard drive, you have to get the digital memories on to the device in a manner that will allow you to find them later on. You don’t want to spend hours looking for that one photo from Uncle Bob’s birthday that was taken three years ago. My suggestion is to file your photos and videos by year, month, date and then subject matter. For example, 2012 / July / 06-04 / July 4th Festivities.
Additionally, if you shoot in RAW format (digital negative), separate those files from your JPEGs, which are the photos that are in a social sharing friendly format. This will allow you to separate your digital “film” from the photos themselves.