Happy New Year!
I love the fresh feeling that New Year’s Day brings. Not only is it a time of reflection of the previous year and set goals for the year ahead, but it feels like an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start fresh.
Often, new years resolutions include decluttering, organizing, and setting project goals. If you are reading this, I think it is safe to assume that your photo mess is one of your goals for this year. Today, I’m going to share one of the best things I ever did in my photo organizing journey. This is something that took a huge weight off my shoulder, started me off with a clean slate and allowed me to stay on track with my goal of keeping my current photos organized. I believe I was more successful at achieving my goal by doing this one thing. Read on or watch this video where I explain this great tip:
Several years ago, in a leadership course I took, we learned how to work smart with Outlook. Yep I’m talking about email. What does email have to do with digital photos? They are both sources of digital clutter! Read on and not only will you learn one of my biggest tips to help you if you are overwhelmed but want to tackle you photo mess…you may just learn how to tackle your email mess too.
In the course, participants were discussing the hundreds and thousands of emails clogging their inbox. We learned about creating rules to automatically move some emails to folders, unsubscribing from unnecessary lists, and deleting emails quickly. Then we learned my favourite tip! We learned to create a subfolder in our in-box. We were instructed to move every single email in our inbox to this newly created folder. When finished our inbox contained ZERO emails. None! Zilch! Nada! It was amazing. They weren’t gone, I could easily access them when I wanted, but I was starting with a clean slate. Now, I do this every year on January 1st. Since I do it every year, the subfolder I create is just named for the previous year. I’ve already done my work email, my personal email, my family email and my business email. All are starting with a clean slate today and it feels wonderful. It is much easier to stay on top of my emails to keep this in-box nice a clean when it starts off clean.
How did I apply this when I started to tackle my photo mess. Well, I created a new folder and moved ALL my photos on my phone to that folder. I named it Joanne’s iPhone. Then I made a folder for Joanne’s iPad and move ALL the photos from my iPad into that folder. I created these folders in my FOREVER account because this is where I ultimately wanted all my photos to be organized, but you can make a folder on your computer or EHD too. Since my photos were now safely stored elsewhere, in a private, secure cloud system, I deleted them off my phone and tablet. I can still easily access the photos from my phone or computer but the digital clutter is gone. I no longer have space warnings on my phone and Apple has stopped asking me to purchase more cloud storage. I started with a clean slate and it was wonderful!
It was much easier to manage my photos when I have so few on my phone on any given time. Remember those other email tips: creating rules to automatically move some emails to folders, unsubscribing from unnecessary lists, and deleting emails quickly. These actions apply to our photos as well.
I have developed the habit of deleting duds and uploading the keepers to my FOREVER account into albums. It only takes a few minutes and I feel motivated to do it because my camera roll is so clean.
Don’t forget about those folders…the junk drawer of photos. Yes, it will still be a mess that you will have to deal with. However, it didn’t seem as bad. I spent a few minutes a day going through those newley created folders to delete the duds and move the precious keepers to a more permanent album (Birthday, Christmas, Favourites etc. – more on organizing in your Forever account another time). Slowly those albums, that started with hundreds of photos was reduced to nothing. It felt so good when I could delete the albums for good knowing that all my photos that had been in those folders had been deleted, or moved to an album for safe keeping.
Now that I’m a photo manager, I still think this is a great strategy if you are overwhelmed by the volume of photos you have. However, I do have a couple more tips before you take the plunge and move all your photos to a new folder. Before you get started, make a note of how many photos you are starting with and write it down. When you are done steps one and two below, check out your total again and see how many you deleted! It feels so good to see your progress.
First, delete all your screenshots. Check out this video to see how you can easily do this.
Second, install the slidebox app and delete the obvious duds. This app is FREE but will pop up with an ad every so often. It isn’t much to purchase the app which eliminate the adds. In my opinion it is totally worth it (I do not make any money from the app I just love it so much and share it with everyone!).
Do not spend a lot of time on this. Take a split second to decide weather to keep or delete and you swipe left to keep and up to delete. You can cover hundreds of photos in a short time. When you delete you will get a progress note of how many you’ve deleted. Please take a screenshot and share in our FB group! I love seeing how many photos people can delete and it inspires others to do the same.
Resources:
Slidebox: install for free. Available for both iPhone and Android: http://slidebox.co/
FOREVER cloud storage: check it out with a free account https://www.forever.com/ambassador/joanne-soltesz
Join my Facebook Group to share your projects, get more tips and inspiration. Did you follow steps one and two above? How many photos did you delete. Share with the group…we all love to hear your progress.
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