Just a tad bit late, here is my second post up for the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks series. The Week 2 prompt is “Favorite Photo,” but rather than sharing a specific photo from my family history, I want to share an organizational strategy I’m using as I continue my mission to get my photos (physical and digital), completely re-organized.
Since 2014, I’ve been using Google Photos as my primary location for all the digital photos I take. Prior to its release, I’d been manually storing all digital pictures into folders categorized by year and month. Then, when Googe Photos came out, I was pulled into its allure and the application of intelligent searching across my photos. However, I found over time that it made me less efficient in finding photos I needed.
As I’ve embarked on my re-organization project, I decided to change my approach to using it. I now use it more for the “camera roll” it is and on a regular basis, move my photos out of the specific folders allocated for “Google Photos” and into my manually constructed folders. Thus, my pictures are now going to be in “Google Photos” folder only temporarily. Then, I finally turned on the function offered for Google Photos to include all pictures in Google Drive and this, in combination with my enhanced metadata, is now really making it easier for me to find the photos I need.
So now, I have the best of both worlds – the magic search of Google Photos AND the efficient organization of my manual system. If I need to search, I do it Google Photos. And, if I know exactly what I am looking for, I go directly to it in my folder hierarchy. Perfect!
