Project Life Process | Photo Storage & Organization

Hi there! Welcome to my second Project Life Process post! Today I wanted to share with you how I go from taking pictures to choosing which ones will actually go into my Project Life album on an organisational level.

I usually have two different camera sources from which I collect pictures. I either take pictures with my mirrorless Olympus Pen camera, or with my phone camera. For each there’s a specific organizational method:

* When importing photos from my camera to my laptop, I’ve got my software set up so that they automatically go in a Olympus file folder. And I select to have my pictures in separate file folders per date within that Olympus file folder. This gives an accessable overview, that makes it very easy to go through the folders within the dates of a particular Project Life week I want to document.

* Pictures from my phone automatically get copied to a specific folder in my Dropbox right after taking them. There are a few other similar systems, like Google+ Photos, ICloud, Flickr, Microsoft One Drive, etc. These systems are usually very easy to set up from your phone with just a few clicks. The pictures in my Dropbox folder are named by date and a serial number. Especially the date is of importance to me when selecting pictures for my Project Life spreads.

Every now and then I also use Instagram pictures for my Project Life album. As I don’t share that many personal pictures on my Instagram account, this doesn’t happen very often. But sometimes a particular crop or filter makes a picture more appealing than the original taken with my camera or phone. In that case I import my Instagram photo into my Dropbox too, and pick it up there for editing, sizing, and/or printing. I usually know which pictures I used for Instagram, and if I would like to use it in my album.

So when I’m ready to work on a new Project Life spread, I open up two file folders on my laptop: the one from my camera, and the Dropbox file with my phone photos. If I for instance would like to work on week 10, I know I have to go looking for the file folders/pictures with dates ranging from March 2nd to March 8th.

At this point I start selecting my favorite pictures of the week, or the ones I want to include because they tell a certain story. I collect them all in a file folder for that particular week, which is stored in a Project Life file folder along with the other weeks folders. After sifting through all camera and phone pictures of that week, I take a closer look at my folder for that week, and start planning my spread. For me it works best to not let too many weeks pile up before sorting my pictures for my spreads. Even if I’m not ready to work on a particular week, I often already arrange them in a folder, so I can edit and print when I want to make a start on another spread.

The folder gives me an overview of the ratio landscape, portriat and square pictures, and so makes planning easier. I sketch out a page protector setup onto a piece of paper, and start writing down which pictures I would like to include in which pockets. I delete any access pictures from my weeks’ folder of select a few more if the selection was too scarce. Up until I come up with a final arrangement, and then the fun part of printing pictures and putting together the spread can begin …

Up until now this system works like a charm for me, but of course there are many other possible methods that can work just as good. What’s your system for storing and organizing your pictures? I would love to hear.

Thanks for stopping by!

Els.

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