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The Ultimate Guide to organising, printing and backing up your personal photos

In this digital age your probably wondering why you need this information. You’ve got all of your photos safe on your phone right? Wrong.

Have you ever thought about what would happen if your phone was lost or stolen? If it fell in the loo? Or if you jumped in the pool to wrangle a misbehaving child fully clothed with your phone in your pocket? Yes, that last one comes from experience!

During this post I aim to help you get your photos more organised, backed up to avoid losing them completely and also getting them printed.

guide to printing and backing up your photos

Backing up your photos 

As mentioned above it’s really important to have more than one copy of your photos. Phones can be lost or damaged, computers and hard drives do fail. It’s too late to wait until after you suffer the misfortune of losing your precious memories to think about backing them up.

Can you imagine losing your child’s whole first year of photos? How would you feel?

My number one choice for photo backup is Dropbox. Dropbox is cloud based and can be logged on to across numerous devices anywhere in the world meaning you always have access to your photos.

Dropbox has both free and paid versions which I’ve outlined for you below.

Free version –  2gb space which equates to approx 650 iphone 6s photos. Free apps for mobile and desktop.

Paid version – 1TB space, paid monthly or annually. Depending on your country prices are approx $13.99 a month.

Other backup options

iCloud – great option for Apple users and those only wanting to backup phone photos. Price 200gb A$4.49 per month or 2TB A$14.99 per month.

Pros – automatically backups up your whole phone

Cons – only for iPhones but can be accessed on PC

Google Drive – 15gb free storage

OneDrive – 15gb free storage

It’s important to research these options to find which is suitable for you. Once you have chosen your backup option make sure to set some time aside at least once a month to backup all your new photos if this is not done automatically with your option.

Organising your photos

Once you’ve figured out how you’re going to backup your photos, its time to get them organised.

My system is to set folders up in the following way;

Year > Month > Date ( or client’s name for business photos)

I also have eg. Year > Holidays > Location

If you have young children you might also find it helpful to organise photos into folders for each child eg. Year > Child > Event ( such as birthday, Christmas etc) This may be very handy for printing photo books which we will talk about next.

Organising your photos into categories and folders will make it so much easier for you to go back and find them in the future for printing, or for embarrassing your child at their 18th birthday!

Printing your photos

There is no better backup than having a physical hard copy of your photos. One of my most favourite childhood memories is when I would visit my grandparents and I’d sit for ages flicking through the photo albums. I know in this age its more like “can I look at the photos on your phone Grandma?” But I believe there is still a place for printing of your special photos, displaying them in your home to enjoy daily and/or having them in a book to look through with your children.

Prints

My recommendation for prints that can be popped into albums or shared with family as well as canvases/framed prints for the wall is The Pro Print Lab. The lovely ladies, Astrid and Kristy, who own the lab are photographers themselves so they understand how important quality prints are in order to preserve your memories. The lab is situated in the North of Tasmania but they have an online ordering system and they post orders Australia wide. As an added bonus they have kindly given me a discount code for you to save 10% off your order. Discount Code is PHOTO10.

Photobooks

A couple of years ago when my children were younger I used to undertake an annual photo project every January – Photo a Day project. From this project I would put together a photo book. Not to be confused with the thicker page style flushmount albums I provide to my clients as Heirloom pieces, these albums were something I didn’t mind the children picking up and flicking through with their grubby little fingers.

My favourite company for this is Blurb. I design my own layouts in Photoshop but they have the option for you to use their templates, drag and drop photos, add text, and you can even design a book using their smart phone app. At the time of writing this post you can save 20% off your first book by signing up to their mailing list.

I hope with all this information you are well on the way to preserving your family’s memories for the future. Do you have any questions? Comment below and i’ll try to answer them for you.

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