Organizing digital library of photos and videos

Organizing Your Digital Library-The Simplest Way

An astounding number of photos and videos are taken and shared in today’s times to fit in a community where smartphones are affordable and social media interwoven into daily life. It is a mesmerizing feeling to find an album and relive those precious moments over the photos and videos you have created throughout your life’s journey. They document our life stories, emotionally engage with our memories and rediscover moments that we have captured. 

Photos and videos bring us joy and happiness. But it’s embarrassing at the same time when you open your gallery and you’re scrolling through an endless list. They pile up over time and it becomes really difficult to find that one picture that you need from your enormous digital archives.

Organizing your digital library can be a time-consuming and daunting task. But with knowledge of some tips and tricks, it won’t have to be. We have been organizing for years and through vast experience gained expertise. We have learned of an easy method that can enable you to have complete control over your digital library.

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The Best And Easiest Way To Organize Photos & Videos

Creating The Folder Structure

The folder structure is key that makes things easier for the years to come. Define the purpose while creating folders and subfolders for easy navigation. Here is a sample of what ours looks like.

The first step is to create folders labeling the years followed by the month. By doing so, you can add files at any time and revisit them whenever in the quickest possible time.

Organizing Photos And Videos
Organizing hard disc

The subfolder includes the place that we visited during that month. ‘Others’ is a folder to curate other content that we captured in the month. Eg: Birthdays or pictures we took at our home.

managing photos and videos

The subsequent subfolder has folders containing events or places we visited arranged by dates or days. This method helped us recollect the names of the places we visited.

managing the hard disk

Each folder inside contains two important folders that segregate videos and photos.

organizing the storage

The folders ‘Photos’ and ‘Videos’ contain three subfolders that define their purpose. ‘Raw’ contains content that is stored straight out of the camera. The files inside the ‘Selected’ folder are chosen for various purposes to publish across social media platforms, or here on our website after editing. These are usually the shortlisted files that are backed up in cloud storage. The ‘Edited’ folder contains media that is processed.

The simplest way to organize digital library

The contents in these folders are again shortlisted or filtered, deleting files that are no longer needed. The ultimate goal is to optimize the accessibility of your digital content. While this method definitely works for us, it is recommended you come up with your own style.

It will take a few minutes at most to organize your digital library. But trust us, you will find that this is time well invested when you easily pull files or content in the future.

Our Thoughts On Google Drive

Google Drive is a free storage platform that allows you to store 15GB of data. We have saved numerous documents and articles in the drive hassle-free. We always select to use the ‘turn off’ auto-sync option because we prefer to free up some memory space for the other important things.

Our advice is to store your photos & videos separately in other cloud storage platforms like Amazon Photos and Drive and use the free Google space to store other PDFs, Excel sheets, and documents. Amazon has unlimited photo storage and 5 GB of video storage for its prime members. Make sure to have an offline backup of your file if you do not have access to the internet.

How To Retrieve Data From Google Drive Easily?

Downloading the data individually takes a lot of effort and time, especially when your storage is huge. The easiest way to get a copy is to use Google Takeout. The files are downloaded in multiple zip files based on the size you choose. However, this does consume time to organize the compressed folders albeit relatively less than downloading the files individually.

How & Why You Should Back Your Data?

No matter how big or small your collection is, it is imperative to back up your files. You never know when your storage device will crash and it is a nightmare when your content is lost. Furthermore, retrieving your lost data costs a lot of money. Besides storing in physical devices, save the most important files in cloud storage spaces. We recommend you create two backups so if anything fails, you still have the other backup that backs up!

Here’s how we back up our digital library:

  • External hard drive 1 – Used for actual photos and videos, transferred from memory cards or mobile on the same day during the trip.
  • External hard drive 2 – Used as 1st backup.
  • Cloud storage – Used as 2nd backup.

It is common to hear from numerous bloggers and content creators narrating their stories of a lost hard disc while traveling and the ones that stopped working without determinable cause, and the thousands of dollars they spent to restore the files, all because they didn’t back up. It is best if we treat their mistakes as foresight and act accordingly to ensure we don’t experience similar loss & regret.

BACK UP NOW, if you haven’t. Proactiveness is better than regrettable reactiveness!

We have been using this external hard drive for more than five years and we haven’t faced any problems to date.

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Creating content takes effort, time, and a lot of resources. Photos and videos are precious memories. It’s always best to ensure that they are organized and safely guarded against any form of mishap. If you have different ways to back your data, or suggestions on the same, do drop a comment.

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