We are passionate about encouraging not just our clients but everyone to back up their images, organize their photos and eventually get them off their computer and on their walls (or into photo books). Photos are the most incredible way to take you back to some of your favorite memories – they’re worth preserving! Today we just wanted to share some tips on how you can best organize, print and preserve your photos!

Organize
After a professional photo session or wedding, most online galleries provide several years of backup through the cloud, but we obviously recommend getting them off the internet and onto your computer.

For our wedding couples, we recommend investing in an external hard drive (like this one) and backing up your wedding photos on it – think of it as the start of your married life memories – use it as a hub for all your personal photos from here on out.

We have a personal external hard drive that we use to house our personal photos – here’s a look at how we organize the photos:

• Year < Month < Event
• For example, last year 2017 had it’s own folder
  • Within the 2017 folder there are 14 more folders (one for each month, one for iPhone photos and one for iPhone videos)
    • Within each of the monthly folders we will have folders for different events/memories from that month and save the images in specific folders named something like “Pumpkin Picking 2017” or “Spring Trip to the Zoo” (So it would look like 2017<October<Pumpkin Picking)
    • Within each of the iPhone folders we dump every photo and video we’ve taken from the year into that folder and do one big “favorites” folder at the end of the year with the images we want to include in our yearly photo album and videos we want to create into a montage.

Print your images
While it’s great to get them off the internet and neatly organized onto your computer, we can’t emphasize enough how important we think it is to print your images! Get them off your computer and onto your walls.

Here are some way you can print your photos and what you can do with them…

• You can print them through the online gallery from your photographer – these prints will most likely come directly through their professional photo lab guaranteeing the accurate color and the best quality – we definitely recommend this if you are ordering large prints, gifts or prints to hang on your walls.
• You can also print them through other quality online websites like mpix.com – if you are looking for somewhere to order something like 50 4×6’s, this website is a great option and will have better color than a Walmart or a Shutterfly. If you are looking for larger prints, you’ll likely want to stick with your photographer’s gallery print options or to reach out to your photographer directly.
• We print images every couple of months, and from those images we put some in Ethan’s memory box, some in Emily’s memory box, and some on the fridge!
• We also try to get family photos taken yearly and use these photos to update the frames on our gallery wall.
• Each year we print a family photo album with a bunch of our favorite memories from the year and as many iPhone photos as we can fit!

Preserve
How are you preserving your images?

First, let’s start with your wedding images. There are several way to preserve your wedding images, but we think the best way is to have an album. A legacy leather or linen bound album is an heirloom – something that is going to be passed down to your kids and their kids to look back on and see where your marriage – their family legacy – began! What a gift! We truly feel that an album is the best way to preserve your images – they won’t get lost or fall out of a photo book, they won’t fade or crinkle. Instead, they will be beautifully printed on luxurious, thick pages and hand-bound in a book to preserve the memories of your wedding day for years and decades to come!

We also love getting albums and photo books of significant life happenings – each of our kid’s births and each of their 1 year cake smash sessions have their own books and since then we have continued with general yearly family photo albums!

I hope this helps a little bit when thinking about how you can best manage not only your wedding photos, but the personal photos you’ll be taking for years to come!

If you have any questions, comment below or email me at info@alisonmishphotography.com