Photo Journal

How you can review your memories before printing.

Today we’re continuing with how to “file” your memories (photos). I’m going to tell you how I use Finder (File Explorer) as a quick reference photo journal.

A few notes to remember:

This is about organizing virtual files…not having less of them;
I have just a few photo files (over 40K+).
I have not printed photos since 2006.
My back-up plan stinks…
I have Lightroom. But I do what I describe below BEFORE I import my photos into Lightroom.
I remember life events in my head like they’re folders, so this works for me.
When I can’t remember or place an event an in my head, I can find it using Lightroom.

Step #5: When a particular month has a main event, I make the folder description have the date.

5.12 Graduation = May 12 was Vince’s Graduation day;
5.15 Graduation Party = May 15th was his Graduation Party.

All photos from Graduation day are in the 5.12 folder and all photos from the Graduation Party are in the 5.15 folder.

In 2013 when we went to the Philippines we did lots of different big events, sometimes we had several in one day. So, I made multiple folders with the same date and each different event.

5.24 Making Stick Brooms = this was a single event on this day, all photos of making the stick brooms are in this folder.
5.24 Trimming… = this was another single event on the same day. You’ll notice “| Bird Nest” is there too. This is because while trimming the mango tree in our back yard, we found a bird nest. All photos from the two-hour block of time are in the same folder.

What I really like: at a glance I can mentally “travel” through our Philippine trip. Days I miss being there, I can take a trip through my memories and anything I want to see a pic to go with the memory – open the folder & look at those pictures.

At the end you can see folders labeled: Cousin Life; House we stayed in; Just pretty sights; Sunsets | Walks | Life; and T-City Life. These folders have duplicates of photos of the topic labeled. Cousin Life = random photos of the cousins just hanging, daily life. not necessarily a “big” event.

**Please note: I DO NOT believe this is completely sufficient for journaling memories! My ever-growing to-do list is to sort/identify/print the good photos and for-real life scrapbook them. :-D