Have you ever been invited to go scrapbooking only to realize that you didn't have photos that you wanted to scrap developed? With more and more of us using digital photography it seems that this is becoming a big problem. In the past we would be so anxious to see the photos that we would send them right in for developing. With digital photography we can immediately see our results which eliminates the need of sending them off for developing. We put off having our digital shots developed and end up storing them on our computers. I had a real scare when my computer hard drive was attacked by viruses. Most of my digital photos had not been backed up. I also quickly realized that they were not very organized! With that realization I began my quest to organize my digital photos and come up with a good system for getting my photos developed for my children to enjoy instead of leaving them on the computer until I get around to scrapping them!

Get Started- Organize your Current Photo Collection
Start by organizing your current photo collection. This can be a very time consuming task if you have been using a digital camera for a long time without an organized system, like myself! Set aside some time that you can sort through your collection without feeling rushed. It can take several hours to sort through and organize your photos, but when you are done, you will easily be able to find those digital memories that you need to have developed for your next scrapbook page!

*Put all Your Photos In One Place The My Pictures folder is a great place to store your photos. Inside that folder create additional folders by year. Go through your entire computer and move all of your photos into the corresponding years folder.

*Purge Duplicates It is virtually free to take digital photos so we all tend to take tons. I often times have dozens of the same exact shot because I just kept snapping to make sure I got the perfect one! You do not have to keep every shot. Keep the best and eliminate the rest. Go through your existing collection and eliminate the photos that are duplicates only keeping the best. In the future you can even eliminate them from your camera before uploading them in order to save some time. If you use an image library of some sort, most cameras come with one, then you can look at your photos and eliminate the ones that you do not want.

*Make it a habit Now that you have your photos organized, get into the routine of downloading new pictures to the same location on a regular basis. I try to do it several times a month.

Create Sub Folders
Your photos are now in order according to the year they were taken. It can still be challenging to find just the photo that you want. We need to organize just a bit more to make this process of finding your photos a little easier! I create subfolders inside of the yearly folders. For instance, I have a New Years Party folder, Mom's Birthday, Feb, vacation etc.

Each time that you upload new photos create a subfolder for those photos so that you can find them later.

Name Pictures Organize your photos each time that you upload them. It will make it easier to find them later. Your camera will probably upload the photos with a number or something. You can change the name of the photo which I highly recommend. Name the photos logically. If there is a group of people, list each persons name for easy retrieval later.

Back Them Up
Getting your digital photos organized and keeping them organized will make sending them for developing much easier! Once my photos are uploaded to my computer I then upload them to Kodak Gallery to serve as my first back up. Then they are also ready to be printed with the click of a couple buttons! Next I back them up to my external hard drive as my second back up.

My photos are now organized, safely backed up twice and ready to be printed. I will admit that it was a very daunting task to go back over the last several years of photos and get them organized. The time spent was well worth having all my digital memories now safe and easy to find! I am so relieved to now have this great organization system in place and I hope that it will help you too!