How to Organize Your Digitized Film!

You have completed the task of sending all your precious photos, negatives, and other film types to be converted to digital.  You decided not to organize your film before they were digitized, and you elected not to organize your images through our IOS post scanning.  Now all you are left with is jumbled up files.

It is so nice having organized files and images to easily be able to call back to.  If you have a good organizational system in place, you should know exactly where to find that photo of Johnny blowing out the candles of his 8th birthday cake.  It can be extremely overwhelming though!  Where do you start?  Well we are here to help you get on your way to a more orderly set of visual memories.  Starting.... NOW!

Step 1-  Decide how you want to store them.  Are you going to upload them to the cloud for storage?  We highly suggest it due to the safety and convenience it offers your files.  Have you decided to forego a cloud service and just want to store it locally?  Determining where you will keep your images may affect how you organize them, as you may want your method to be easily understood by others, should you choose to share your legacy or images.  Again, we will state this because we want to help you keep your digital past as secure as possible.  We recommend saving your images to as many places as possible, including in the cloud!  This includes storing it locally, on external hard drives, Discs, etc.

Step 2- Decide how you want your digital files to be organized.  Would you like to organize them chronologically by year?  This is probably the most common method.  Then, if you decide, within each year you can have sub folders for events, such as Christmas, or Matt's Wedding.  You can also choose to organize them by person, but with this method you will most likely want one picture in more than one folder, so you will be copying and pasting a lot - which makes for easily passing on images to your kids or grandchildren, but it does require some extra work.

Step 3- Get all your photos in one place!  It will make your life so much easier if you copy all your digitized film in one place, saving you the time of going back and forth.  Save them all to the place you have decided to store them locally.  Then, after you have organized them locally, you can upload them to the cloud, and transfer copies onto an external hard drive, and your organization will transfer along with it.

Step 4- Get to Work!  What we recommend doing, if you are a Windows user, is to create all your folders FIRST.  At least all the folders you think you will want.  Then afterwards you can look at your leftover images and see what more you need.  To create a new folder, simply click on the folder or drive where you would like your photos stored on, and select "New Folder"at the top.  You should probably call this first folder "Photos" or "My Picture Perfect Past" or whatever you would like, to indicate that all your digital images are stored there, and then repeat the new folder steps to create the rest of your folders.

After you have completed the roots to your organization, stay in Windows Explorer, and open the folder containing all your pictures.  Make sure you are viewing thumbnails of your pictures for easier organizing.  After all your images have loaded and are view-able, make sure you can see all your newly created folders on the right hand side.  Now, here is the fun part!  Start with the first photo, determine what folder it goes it, and simply drag and drop it to the designated folder.  Repeat this process until you are officially organized!

It is SO easy!

Step 5- After you have completed all your digital image organization, upload them to the cloud!  Unfortunately, computers can crash, and if they do you risk losing all your digitized film AND all your hard work.  You can avoid this!  Like we said before, store your images in as many places as you can, including the cloud!

Step 6- SHARE THEM!  What good are your memories if you don't share them with your family and friends?  Email them photos, upload them to your favorite social media site, whatever floats your boat.

We hope this has been helpful in helping make the most of your digitized memories.

If your film has not yet been converted to digital, let us help you!  We are the most trusted name in the film conversion industry, and do everything we can to make sure your priceless memories get the respect they deserve in the digitization process.  You film will NEVER be shipped overseas, but will be completed here in the United States.