Adrienne Patterson: How Do I Organize All of my Pictures?...

I just returned home from a fabulous week at the beach with my family and all the way home I was dreading what awaited me….unpacking, ugh!!  However, upon returning from a trip there is always one single thing that motivates me through the unpacking and that is uploading all my pictures!!  I love, love, love pictures and getting to see how they actually turn out is the best. 

I remember back in the day snapping pictures on my little camera and then unloading the film and dropping it off to be developed.  The wait (and yes there actually used to be a wait to see your pictures) was torture.  Then there was the 1 Hour Photo at Wal Mart so the wait got more bearable and then in college there was actually a Half Hour Photo, even better!  How far we have come from loading and unloading that precious film and carrying it across town and having to actually wait to see what the pictures look like.  (Nothing like snapping a roll of 24 pics only to have them developed and discover closed eyes, unfocused and off centered. Or like me, take a fabulous ski trip with your boyfriend in the beautiful NC mountains with the bright blue sky standing in contrast to the stark white snow and you look super cute in your new colorful ski jacket only to discover upon pick up that you used all black and white film!!)  Yes, digital cameras have been one of the best inventions ever but I must say that websites like Shutterfly run a very close second!! 

I would be totally lost without Shutterfly, in fact if the website goes down my children will have no memory of their childhoods, LOL!  While Shutterfly is an amazing place to store photos, edit them, turn them into gifts and share them you actually do have to do the legwork of downloading (or uploading…what IS the difference??) the pictures.  In some cases there are actually people (Beth) who wait and must download 2000+ photos at one time and then you have a gazillion pics on Shutterfly but how do you organize them??  A few simple tips can help you stay on top of the job and have a Shutterfly account that is akin to Martha Stewarts linen closet…neat, precise and well organized!

• First, organize your Shutterfly (or photo site of your choise) account.  Figure out how you want your pictures organized.  By season, event, date, etc.…I have a folder for each of my girls for each age.  I also have a folder for family pictures and one for each holiday.

• This step is crucial if you plan to make photo books or calendars!  Once they are sorted you can go right to the pics you need and for the photo books you can even simply select the folder and make a book instantly since all your pics will be in dated order!!

• Download your pictures as soon as possible!!  This is probably the most important and crucial to staying organized.  For me if I have a picture of all 3 of my girls I put a copy in each girls’ appropriate folder and if it is also a picture of them at Christmas I put another copy in the Christmas folder.  So sorting can be a bit time consuming but if you do the pictures as you take them the task is much more manageable. 

• Take the time to weed out your photos. If you took 17 shots trying to get the perfect Christmas card picture just keep the one you choose and maybe 2 or 3 of the imperfect ones to remind you of the hell it was to get that 1.  Take the time to edit your photos and just keep the ones you really want to remember.

Pictures are the one thing we all treasure, it’s what we would run back into a fire to salvage.  Now, thanks to websites like Shutterfly, we can not only store tons of memories but we can keep better track of them and they are preserved forever!!