Organizing My 50,000 Photos

"Orange Crush"
Acrylic Abstract 36" x 48"
​Available

Every week I get emails inquiring as to how I organize my photos. Two weeks ago my co-host Debra Huse and I shared on the Artists Helping Artists show ways artists can organize their photos. If you missed the show you might want to listen to it here. 

Just so you know, for about a year I have known it was time to get my own photos better organized. 
I am a Mac girl so my experience has been with the apple products for at least the last ten years. I have spent hours and hours attending training and One-on-One sessions at the Apple Store here in Pasadena. But one problem always plagued me. Why couldn't I easily share my photos between my three computers in iPhoto?

For over a year the folks at the Apple Store have said, "it's coming". So when the Mac upgrade El Capitan was released with the highly touted new Photos software I thought the answer to my problems was here. Unfortunately that was not the case.

To make a long story short, my 50,000 photos on my laptop were contained in an iPhoto file that was about 250 gigabytes. Yep, 250 gigabytes. That is a very large file. In order for El Capitan to transfer all of my files from iPhoto to Photos I needed a lot more available storage on my computer. So I pulled out my two terabyte hard drive and figured out how to copy the file and reload it on my desktop (not laptop). So I am now uploading all 50,000 photos to the cloud so I will soon be able to access all of my photos from any of my computers. The only problem? The Apple technician estimated it will take a week for the files to upload. Today is day fifteen of the upload and there are still 1,000 photos left to upload. And so much for making a long story short. Sorry.

Once the photos are uploaded then I will be ready to move a lot of photos in to folders. I had a lot of "events" (in iPhoto) which are now "folders" (in Photos) with titles such as flowers, boats, still life, ventura, beaches, etc. All of these folders are inspirational photos I have taken over the years that will make great paintings one day. But I also have a lot of photos filed by date and those all need to go into categorized folders. Ugh.

Once the folders are all set then I will finalize my back-up options. I have a one terabyte Time Machine back up which backs up everyday. I also have my hard drive back up will probably be stored someplace off site just to be safe. Finally, the cloud is my last back up. I think four copies of my file of 50,000 photos is safe!

This is all giving me a headache. I hope I haven't caused the same for any of you. It's time to organize your photos. You need to make sure they are accessible, organized (i.e. easy to find) and safely "backed-up". It's important.