How I store my photos

Today’s post is all about – as the title says – ‘How I store my photos’ but as the photos to go with that would literally be computer screen grabs I thought I’d share more photos from London Fashion Week with the Collyer Twins again. I was really pleased with how these images turned out so I wanted to share the full set here rather than just posting one on instagram.

I wanted to start off by saying thank you to you guys for the feedback on my recent post ‘7 Tips for editing on the go’ I was so pleased that the post was beneficial for you lovely lot. One question I got asked was how I store my photos and keep them categorised and organised. Upon thinking about it I knew I wanted to share my process with you all. Its become a normal routine for me as I’ve been storing photos this way since I was around 13, it’s super simple and helps you to keep all your photos organised and in a nice structure to help you find images quickly and easily when you need to go back to them.

I store my photos categorised by date, firstly in year which is my master folder for that year, so ‘2019’ followed by a folder for each month of that year so ‘201901’ for January, ‘201902’ for February and so on. I make a new folder in this format at the start of each month. Then finally a specific date folder for the date the photos were shot which follow this formatted Year-Month-Day – 20190317 for example’. This system is really helpful for me as I have a lot of photos to store and have quite a few hard drives with all my photos on, so if I need to go back and find a specific shoot/event I need to be able to find it quickly and easily and this storage system helps me to do just that.

Another thing I always do to help me store my photos is downloading and formatting my memory cards regularly. I don’t like to leave memory cards with all old photos stored on them. Once I have downloaded the photos into a dated folder I double check all the files have been copied over, usually by checking the first and last file name to check I have got them all. I will check again and then usually a third time. If you’ve lost images in the past you will know the panic and pain of losing photos and that feeling you’ll never be able to retrieve them is a bitter pill to swallow, so if there’s one thing I urge you to do it’s double and then triple check you have your photos stored safely and backed up. Once you’ve done this I will then delete the images from the memory card and what I also do is format the card so that any cached items stored in the card are removed too, freeing up as much space as possible on the memory card.

I hope that this post can help you to organise your own photos, it may seem like a daunting task at first to organise all of your old photos. But I’d like to start by saying you don’t need to do it all at once. My system may not work with how you’ve previously stored your photos so I’d suggest you start by storing all your new photos in this way and then gradually make new folders for your old photos to store in this new way also. If you have any further questions about how I store photos or anything similar then please do leave me a comment or shoot me an email. I really do love hearing your feedback and answering your questions.