111 - How to Keep Photos Organized with 4 Kids
Affiliate links have been used in this post! I do receive a commission when you choose to purchase through these links, and that helps me keep this podcast up and running—I truly appreciate when you choose to use them!
Resources from this episode:
Show Notes:
Every mother is stuck in this paradox of wanting so badly to photograph and keep and preserve their children's lives and childhoods with organized photos and baby books. But the very thing that keeps us from doing that are our children. They consume so much of our time and mental energy. It feels impossible to stay on top of their photos.
Well, being that I used to be a professional photographer, I have set out to simplify this process and do something about it. And today I'm going to tell you how I plan to keep my photos organized with four kids.
For the full episode, hit play above or read through it below.
I feel like it'd be helpful to start this episode with a quick overview of life for me right now, and then kind of the backstory of how all of my photos were crazy disorganized and how I got them organized, and then I want to share you my plan moving forward to keep them all organized with four kids.
So if you've been following me or listening for a while, you know, I was a professional photographer, weddings and families for 12 years. Everyone's images were so beautiful and they were so organized and I took gorgeous photos and I knew how to edit them and organize them and keep them all backed up and do such a good job with everyone else's photos. But mine were a hot mess.
All of my personal photos, they were scattered, disorganized on different CDs, hard drives computers. They were everywhere there. It was a mess. I had no idea where to find anything. It was, it was terrible. And I was like, this shouldn't be this way because I'm a professional photographer. And what I did is I decided, okay, I'm going to block off two days, two whole days and do the work of figuring out the system. I wanted to get all my photos in one place, get them organized, kind of do some trial and error and figure out how do I organize my photos? And so the first day I gathered all my printed photos. I think I had like 22 photo albums from high school. I've always loved photography, I’ve taken pictures of every trip I've ever been on. I've made photo albums for everything. I loved it, but I had way too many. And I gathered all of my printed photos in the room, just laid them all out in piles, big buckets of photos, Tupperware, you know, those like storage containers, buckets full of photos. And I organized them all.
And then I did the same thing with my digital photos. I gathered all my hard drives all my computers, literally some floppy disks—I kid you not—and got them all together and put them in one place and organized them. And I got a System and then I said, okay, well, now that my photos are organized, I need a monthly system or quarterly system, some sort of system moving forward because the amount of photos on my phone are out of control.
So I did it. I took two whole days and I got everything organized and not everything was edited and done and in photo albums by the end of those two days, but I knew where everything was and it felt so good. And I made a plan and I made a photo organization system, which I now teach in my course called the Legacy Photo System, which I'll tell you about in a minute.
But as I was making this plan, I realized I need like a vision for my photos. I need a big picture. What do I want for my family photos? And I kind of came down to this, and I will just say, this does not have to be the same for you and your family, this is what I have decided to do for me and my family:
First, annual family yearbooks. I want a yearbook of each year of our family's life as we grow.
Second, I want a baby book for each child, I want that to be something that I can give to them one day and just capture them while they're little, while they're babies.
Third, I want printed photos. I don't want them all to live on my computer all the time. I want to print them. I want to have photos that they can feel and touch and look at and flip through. And I want them framed. And I want some in boxes. I just, I want them printed.
And lastly, I want a hard drive of well-organized, easily accessible photos. So when graduations come along, when weddings come along and we need to do those slideshows, I'll know where everything is. I'll know where to go and what to pull from. And I just want to know how I can access the past trips that we've been on and just quickly look at and enjoy our photos and not be so overwhelmed.
Okay? Like I said, those are the four things that I want for me and my family and your family, yearbooks, baby books for each child, printed photos, loosely organized and organized hard drive that might look different for you. You might not want to do baby books. You might not want to do annual yearbooks. That's fine. That is totally okay.
This is just my system. And this is what I teach. And I say, Hey, you take and choose what you want to apply to your family. All in all, it’s a process. It's a process. It takes some time, some emotional and mental energy to do the work, but it's worth it. And I call the whole process my Legacy Photo System.
You can always learn more about that if you go to LegacyPhotoSystem.com, that's where I show you how I do my printed and digital and monthly photos and keep them all organized. But what I have learned: it’s up to me to do this. Nobody else in my family is going do this system. Nobody else in my family is going to take the time to organize our photos.
My husband's not going to do it. The kids aren't going to do it. And if it's not me, who's doing it? They're just going to keep piling up. Tens of thousands of photos on my phone, on my computer, and it's going to be a mess, and I'm never going to know how to access my favorite photos.
So here's where I am right now in life. I have three little kids. The time of this recording, they're ages five, three, two, and I'm pregnant with my fourth, my two littlest ones right now, they came 16 months apart and totally threw me for a loop. I got really behind on our family photos, just because of life with littles and diapers and nursing and just the craziness of having little kids.
And so since I've stopped breastfeeding, since they're all in kindergarten and preschool, two days a week. And since I feel like I've gotten a little bit more into a schedule, I've been working hard to get caught up on baby books on family albums. I'm not there yet. I'm going to be very honest with you, I’m not there yet, but I'm getting closer.
And as you know, I'm about to have my fourth baby this summer. So I wanted to share my plan to do things before the baby comes, and then three things after the baby comes. This is kind of how I'm organizing it in my brain and planning to take authority over my family photos in this season of my life. So three things to do before this baby comes.
Before baby— #1
Get caught up. Okay, that's like a really big number one. I get it. But let me break that down for you.
- For me, that means I need to order last year's family yearbook, the 2020 family yearbook. I need to design it and order it.
- I want to print a bunch of photos. I'm behind them printing them, and I can quickly make a folder of some lovely memories we've had from 2020 and 2021 so far and just print a bunch of them.
- I need to do Beaufort baby book. I am going to admit, I, I haven't done anything. I mean, I have all his photos ready to be printed. I hadn't done anything. So I need to work on that. I want to fill up the pages of his baby book and get that pretty much done if I can.
- I just want to update and refresh the frames around my home so that it's reflective of the season of life that we're in now. Okay. So that's what number one means to get caught up before the baby.
Those are a lot of big projects that I want to do, but I think I'm just going to choose like a weekend to tackle each of these things. And I know the baby book is going to last me more than just a weekend, but if I go ahead and schedule an a weekend, just to look through the baby book and order all the pictures, then I'll easily be able to put it together after that.
#2
The second big thing I want to do before baby is by a fourth baby, book it, start filling it out now for this fourth baby, because one thing I've realized there are some prompts in the baby. We usually use Emily Lay's baby book. It's really beautiful. I also really love Artifact Uprising’s baby books, but there are prompts in there that you can fill out before baby comes. And if I can go ahead and do that now, it will get my mind kind of in the mode of filling out and preparing for this baby before he or she arrives, which is just good. It'll give me a little bit of a head start, unlike Beaufort, which I haven't done anything with his yet.
#3
And then the third big thing I want to do before this baby comes is just to schedule all of my photo shoots that are important to me. My maternity photos, my birth photography, my newborn photos, all of these things, something I've done—worth every penny—for every single baby. And it guarantees that I'm capturing this season of life and this important season of having our fourth baby.
So those are the big things that I want to do before July. I want to get caught up before this baby, caught up with my kind of system that I have in place. I want to buy another baby book and just start filling it out and have it open and out for when baby comes. And then I went to schedule all of my big photo shoots: maternity, birth, and newborn.
After Baby—
Here are the three things I plan to do after baby. So once all of that is done before this baby comes, I'm going to feel so good. I'm going to feel so caught up. After baby is I'm going to, I'm going to have to recommit, right? Because when you enter newborn baby land, it's really hard to wrap your mind around doing any kind of project or dealing with your photos at all.
And I know that I'm going to have probably four times as many photos on my phone. I'm going to be taking a lot more photos on my phone than I normally do, because that's what you do the first year that you have a baby, and that's a good thing. So, like I said, three things to do after baby—
#1
First thing is to have newborn photos taken and to take those monthly growth photos of the baby.
So I know that's kind of repetitive from something previously. I need to schedule the newborn photos, but I actually have to have those photos taken. And then once I have this taken, I want to also commit to taking those monthly growth photos of the baby. Cause that's something that we do for their baby books.
#2
The second thing after baby, I'm going to move my monthly photo dates that I normally do every month to once a quarter. I know that time becomes a blur. I remember very clearly that like you don't know what's day and night. You don't know what's up and down. You are just trying to feed your baby and feed your family and get adequate sleep and maybe take a shower every once in a while. The photos are going to be the last thing on my mind, so I'm going to move my monthly photo dates to quarterly photo dates. Maybe even I'll tackle photos for the first time when the baby's six months old, whatever I feel like doing, it's going to be either three months or six months. I'm okay with that, because I have a newborn baby and I'm just going to let the photos pile up on my phone, and I'm not going to be hard on myself because I have a newborn baby.
So if you don't know what my monthly photo date is, I'll explain it to you. It's the time that I take to drag and drop all of my photos onto my personal hard drive. I have one hard drive that houses all of my personal photos. And so I'll download them all from my phone. I'll download them all from my nice camera and then I sort them and I edit them into Final Event Folders. And what that means is I'll organize them into folders and inside those folders there, they're only going to have a few of my favorite images from these events in our life.
So once I have the baby, I will have a favorites iPhone folder from all of my favorite iPhone pictures. I'll have a folder for maternity photos. I'll have a folder for birth photos. I’ll have a folder for newborn photos. And I'll probably thinking about it. I'll have a folder for Lyndon's birthday party because Lyndon's birthday party will happen very close to when this baby's born. It's any kind of life event that you'll have. And so I want to make sure that I take time to sort them just to choose my favorite images from each of those so that you don't have hundreds and hundreds of images from those events, and then you put them into your final events folders.
Once I do that, and those photos are chosen, they're organized and labeled in their folders. I will back those final folders up online. I use Dropbox to backup all my photos, and then they're going to be in my hard drive, they’re also going to be online, and then I'm going to choose my favorite ones to print and I'll print them.
Now, that is my monthly photo date. If I'm feeling motivated with this new baby and I want to do them monthly, great, I will totally do that, but I am not putting that pressure on myself. I'm intentionally taking that off of my plate and saying, I'm just going to aim for maybe three months, maybe six months. I'm not going to put that pressure on. I have the system, I'll get to the system when I get to the system.
#3
The last thing I'm going to plan to do after baby is just keep updating the baby book. This is something that is so easy to neglect. Clearly I haven't done it for Beaufort. I was very late for Lyndon’s, as well. This time around. I'm just trying to get in my mind. I want to try to stay on top of it this time, because if I can plan these things out and mentally kind of prepare for this precious baby's arrival and for how I want to manage the photos around his or her arrival, I think that I'll be more successful at it this time.
Now for the years to follow sweet baby Ray #4, I just simply plan to stick with my Legacy Photo System. That means my photos are going to be printed in a few boxes that I love, they’re beautiful boxes from the container store. They are stored in a cabinet right next to our dining room table. Or sometimes I put them on display. I will continue to create a family yearbook each year and I will continue to organize my photos once a month.
I'll probably start that cadence and rhythm back up again when baby four hits a year. Doing those things just brings me peace of mind. You know, I know I'm handling my family's photos. I know they're all backed up. I shared on Instagram a few weeks ago that my personal hard drive with all of my photos slid off of my computer and down off of the top flight of my stairs and like crashed down to the first floor of my home.
I was so stressed out. I can't even tell you, like, I almost just burst into tears because that's where I have all of my photos. But in that very instant, I thought, you know what, if they're all gone, I know they're backed up. I know they're backed up. And miraculously, I plugged in the hard drive in it still worked, which was incredible, but anyway, that was a tangent. I know that I'm handling my photos. They're backed up. They're printed. I make family yearbooks. And it just allows me to do a few things. It allows me to just have the peace of mind to do life. It allows me to have a phone that's clear and not overloaded with photos all the time.
And it allows me to take more intentional photos of my kids because when I'm managing them on a more regular basis, I actually take less photos of my kids and more intentional ones. I have my phone in my hand less, and I'm more intentional with the photos I take, which is a beautiful thing.
So one of the questions I get asked the most is, is your Legacy Photo System going on sale anytime soon. And if you know me, you know, I usually only offer a sale on this course twice a year. And I wanted you to know the sale is coming. I have such a heart for mama's getting a game plan to organize and protect the photos of their kids in really a day and age where we have 10,000, 20,000, 40,000, even 60,000 photos on our phone to manage. It's overwhelming.
So mark your calendar, May 5th through the 10th, we are having our Mother's Day Sale for the Legacy Photo System.
Be sure to visit legacyphotosystem.com May 5th through the 10th to get more details. Also, you can just start working on it now, get all the photos off of your phone and get them organized, and you can do that very quickly and easily with a free guide that I've made just for you had to legacyphotosystem.com/guide, and you'll learn how to get all of your photos off of your phone safely.
So that's it. That is my plan for keeping my photos organized with four kids. I think it's going to be a lot of work right before baby arrives, and then it will feel like a lot of work after baby's born, even though it's just going to be kind of maintaining.
I'm excited about it. The thing about this is I actually get excited about it. I'm excited to refresh everything, to get it organized order that last family yearbook, and then to know everything's going to be set and ready before baby comes.
So I hope this has helped you wherever you are in your family's life and with your photos. I hope that maybe it's gotten your wheels turning, helping you think through what do I need to do now? What projects do I want and what do I want my photo legacy to look like for my family?
Karl Lagerfeld said, “What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
I couldn't agree more. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.
