Are You A Photo Hoarder Or A Photo Storyteller
Are you a photo hoarder or a photo storyteller?
Disclosure: There are some affiliate links below, and I may receive commissions for purchase made through the links in the post. However, these are products I highly recommend. I won’t list anything I haven’t tried and found personally useful.
Why do you take photographs? Most likely, it is to document your life, everything from important events such as weddings or reunions to the little moments that capture your attention.
Before 2004, most of our photos were analog. Fast forward, and today everyone has a camera in their hand, and we are taking more digital images and drowning in photos. Per Mylio, a recognized photo management application, in 2020, we took 1.4 trillion photos.
Like the old printed photos of the past, piled in boxes and albums, your digital images are stashed on every device and eating up your cloud space. Chances are your digital archive is bursting at the seams. If you don’t have an ordered system, your photos may languish into forgotten idleness.
You’ve gone to great effort to photo journal the many moments of your life. Now it’s crucial to assure they are there and handy when you want to enjoy them.
If the thought of organizing your photos strikes dread, breathe easy and read on to learn actionable steps you can take to gradually coral your photographs for ease of use. We’ll also offer up ideas to heighten your enjoyment of your photo collection by turning them into meaningful art and a tool to connect with others.
Too much without order just becomes too much.
BREAK THE PHOTO HOARDING CYCLE
If you’ve seen the A&E show Hoarders, you have this idea of people struggling in a pile of stuff because they can’t control collecting it.
You may not think of your digital image archive as something visibly weighing you down. But if you don’t organize your photos, they may turn into a pile of rubbish, and you’ll have a hard time tapping into them later.
It’s essential to create a system to order your photos so you can go from photo hoarder to photo curator and storyteller. By adopting and using a photo organizing system, you’ll be able to pull them up for special events and conversations quickly.
DEAL WITH YOUR DIGITAL IMAGES
Delete and filter your images. Pull your images off long abandoned and current devices and download them to a central location such as Google Photos or your preferred cloud service.
Begin the tedious but essential process of swiping through your images to either delete or save them into folders. Label the folders with titles that make sense for you, such as dates, people, events. Or any combination of the three.
I just did this myself and was stunned, given I don’t think of myself as a prolific photo taker (like my spouse), to discover I really did have a lot of photos! Many of them are easy to delete, including duplicate images and things such as receipts.
You may feel squeamish about deleting images of important people but ask yourself, “Is this the best photo of this moment and this person?” And then ask, “Does this photo relate to an important story?” If you waffle at all on either of these questions, then hit the delete button and move on.
If you have analog photographs, now would be the right time to scan them and pull them in for organizing as well. If there are many photos, you may want to hire out a service to have them scanned and ordered so that you can include them in your digital archive as well.
The sifting, sorting, and deleting of images will take some time. It’s a great activity to do while doing something like binge-watching a season of a show or listening to an audiobook (I recommend Ozark on Netflix if you’ve not caught it yet!), and I enjoy listening to books on my Audible subscription service.
2. Copy photos you want off social media. Outlets like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can change at any time or disappear entirely. Be sure to copy your images from these platforms to your computer as a part of your photo organizing project. PCMag offers instructions on how to do download from Facebook to your computer. You’ll want to do some research to learn about your options for other social media websites.
3. Print the real keepers. I know it seems crazy to take something digital and turn it into paper, but technology is fickle. The tech tool you use today to view images may not work a decade from now. For your signature photos, you’ll want to print hard copies. The easiest method to print your photos is via books on an on-demand printing service such as Blurb.
4. Back them up: By pulling all your images together and storing them in the cloud, and printing those that are most important to you, you’ve gone a long way to save your photos and the memories they record. One final step is to place your archive on an external hard drive you keep in a safe and easy-to-access place.
So many devices, so many places for your photos to hide.
TURN PHOTOS INTO CONNECTION
The other day I was sitting with a friend when her sister sent her an image via text. It was a picture of my friend when she was a toddler. My friend explained that her sister had taken all their old family slides and had them digitized. She frequently receives photos from her sister that she has never seen before and delights in those shared moments.
Share Your photos via messaging or emails. By now, unless you’ve been avoiding the news entirely, we all have a better sense of how social media target-markets to us in exchange for our data. While many have chosen to pull back from the social sharing, the concept of sharing is still a good one and particularly meaningful when photographs are included.
Consider sending photos, along with your comments, to a select friend or group via messaging or even old-fashioned email. You could even go truly “off the grid” and send photos via snail mail! Real mail with pictures and a note is significant since it is quite rare these days.
Turn your photos into art. Dip into your creativity and consider turning a selection of images into a collage or mosaic. I’m not talking about scrapbooking per se, although this is one alternative. For those who love technology, there is something called digital scrapbooking, which involves the use of Photoshop or use the program to create mosaics, too.
There are many digital tools to help you create photo collages, including Be Funky and Canva, which are available for free. Your art can become a wall hanging, or something printed on other items via on-demand printing from a service such as Café press.
My spouse is an artist, and he has long used photos to incorporate into art. I love how he pulls together his artistic abilities, photographs, and his humor to create something new.
YOUR ROLE AS PHOTO STORYTELLER
Photos are stand-alone storytelling tools, but over time they’ll need the help of your memories to retrieve their meaning.
You’ve taken the time to document your life, by organizing your photo archive now, you assure you won’t have a hoarder’s mess later. Instead, you’ll have a collection of treasured photos that will serve you and help you tell the stories of your life.
Postscript: When things seem out of control like it feels these days, acting where we have control is a comfort. Cleaning up your stuff is within your power! If you need help getting going on organizing your home check out Get Organized Gal’s courses for support.
I used her course to organize my office, and it is in pretty good shape these days. Success in one space has lead to cleaning channels to other rooms and photos as well. Check out he courses here.
Sherry and Alexandra Borzo together in Lima, Peru
Sherry is the founder of Storied Gifts a personal publishing service of family and company histories. She and her team help clients curate and craft their stories into books. When not writing or interviewing, Sherry spends loads of time with her grandchildren and lives in Des Moines, Iowa.
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The shop is a mother and daughter venture for Sherry and Alexandra Borzo of Content In Motion. They both work to help their client's stories sing. The shop is their effort to inspire a focus on healthy minds for everyone through positive thought.
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