We all have photos. Many many photos. The question now is which photos to discard and which to keep. With the plethora of applications out there to organize your photos, it can be hard to know where to start.
In this post, I want to pose some questions that will help you set a course before you start organizing your photos.
Before I list these questions, I want to give you a warning. Organizing your photos will take time and possibly money. So be sure of your desired outcome before starting on this project. With that said…
Why do you want to organize your photos?
1) You want to share photos with others, using a particular structure (trips, families, school, worship)
2) You want to view your photos in a particular way (e,g, by event, by time)
3) You want to capture information about your photos (e.g. who is in the photo, where the photo was taken)
4) You want to enjoy your photos all in one location
5) You are running out of storage on your phone
Who will help you?
1) Are you in this by yourself or do you have other people invested in this effort?
2) Do you have all the resources (e.g. time, knowledge, money, technical know-how) needed?
3) What is the long term plan for the storage area? If it is online it will require stewardship over time, including possibly paying fees for storage.
Do you have a deadline?
1) This effort takes time. If you have a looming deadline, you need to be realistic about how many photos you can organize.
2) On the flip side, if you don’t have a deadline, how will you keep the momentum going on this project?
Do you have an editorial plan?
1) What principles will you use to include or discard a particular photo?
2) What constitutes a ‘good’ photo? How high will your standard be?
3) Will you be cropping and editing photos while organizing them?
How much metadata do you have for each picture?
(Metadata is just a fancy word for information about each picture. When we used to write on the back of a physical photo, that was metadata.)
1) Do you have a lot of metadata available for each picture?
2) Do you want to be able to ‘tag’ and sort photos based on this metadata?
3) Does someone else have the metadata you need? Will that person help you with inputting this data?
Do you want to share these photos?
1) If yes, will you share both viewing and downloading access?
2) Do you want people to be able to upload to your storage area?
3) Will you exercise curatorial rights on photos that are uploaded?