Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Why you need to organize and edit your photos and videos

I believe that I create and average volume of pictures and videos with my electronic devices, which consist of an iPhone 4s (I am holding out for the iPhone 6), a Nikon D40x, and a Cannon Vixia HFM52 (a fantastic HD video recorder). I was getting concerned that no one will care to look at some of this stuff and I wondered what I should do about it.

What I did was start to organize, delete, and annotate. I started renaming those nondescript files that I've collected in various places (more on various places later). So instead of "IMG_0192" from my iPhone it now says "Kate_Concert1_Dec_2013". I still create a "Kate" folder and put the image there, and I could create folders by year there as well, but now, whenever the files is moved or shared, there is little doubt what the contents are.

Now, do you remember the days when you would go to someone's home and they would bring out these humungous photo albums and refuse to feed you until they let you go through and talk about all of the photos? Well, things have only gotten worse. Now that they, and you, can shoot pictures without having to insert a new roll of film and now that you can take picture for free, things have gotten very bad. You might have to sit through many hundreds and hundreds of photos. Now think of the photos that you shoot. I am sure that you also have hundreds and hundreds and more. So, what you need to do is go through them and save those that you are proud of, be ruthless, your ancestors, nieces, nephews, children, siblings, and friends will love you. Sure, if you want to save all of them just for you and then have another set to show real people, then that is fine. And you will come across as a great photographer because people will believe that all of your photos turn out like that, because few people take the time to delete stuff.

So, where are you storing your photos? Don't believe for a second that your home computer or iPhone will never crash, get damaged, stolen, or run away? Put this stuff somewhere. If you have a Google account or an Amazon Prime account you already have lots of offsite storage and each offer upgrades. What I encourage you to do is get a cheap 1 TB drive like that WD My Passport Ultra (highly recommended and about the size of my iPhone) and organize all of your photos, then archive this to an external location like Amazon Prime or Google Docs. If you have more $$ I highly recommend a combination of SmugMug ($60/yr for the Power edition for storage, organization, digital albums and much, much more)  and  Photoshop Lightroom.($119 for photo editing), truly a perfect combination.


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