How to Organize Your Video and Picture Library

With the holidays fast approaching, and families getting together to celebrate, one of the most important things you can do to preserve your memories is to organize your video and picture library. So many of us have our photos and videos scattered all about, usually with little or no back-up. Not only is it harder to find a specific image, it is at a high risk of being lost forever. You can do this task yourself, or hire a professional organizer to help.

Use a Dedicated External Hard Drive

Using an external hard drive to store your video and pictures on it will keep you from taking up space on your computer's hard drive. Buy an external hard drive to use only as your picture and video library. Keep it in a safe place, and you will always have your special memories.

Label Photos

Label all photos as you save them, videos too. Don't keep dropping all your images into one file. Spend some time sorting out the ones you want to keep, and delete the rest. If you have several similar photos, choose the highest quality one to keep. Take the time to label each image and video with dates, the names of the people in them, and where it was taken. If it was from a special event, make note of that as well.

Label Folders

Label photo and video folders in order to stay organized. Make a separate folder for each event you took pictures of. Label it with the date and event name. Random images can be placed in folders labeled with the year and season. For example, pictures in the summer months could all be classified as "summer 2013."

Empty Your SD Card Regularly

We have all been guilty of this. We keep way too many pictures and videos on the SD card in the camera. Empty the SD Card routinely. By clearing photos from your SD card, you are making sure you'll never get stuck without enough room. Having a full card can lead to hastily deleting photos and videos you will later wish you had kept. You could also miss a current photo opportunity. If you can't remove photos after each event, set up a specific day each month to do it.

Keep Copies of All Pictures and Videos

Have at least two copies of your saved photos. Choose two places to keep them from among the following choices.

• Computer or Laptop
• DVDs
• CDs
• Hard Drive
• Thumb Drive
• Internet Storage

A Professional Organizing Service can help you with this. Keep each copy in a different spot, preferably far from each other. That way if a disaster destroys your pictures in one area, you will still have them in the other location. A cloud-based service on the web is ideal for a secure second place, especially in the case of a flood, fire, or other natural disaster.

You can also keep a copy with other important items in a fire proof storage safe or a safe deposit box. Remember to check your pictures each year to assure they are still readable. You will need to make new copies every five years, so as not to lose the data. This also holds true with digital data storage for your home- or work-related documents.
 
A Professional Organizer could be essential if you have several years of photos and video. They can help you get everything arranged and labeled, ready for safe keeping. Whether you have done the work yourself or not, be sure to keep up with all future images. Nothing is more devastating than to lose those special moments caught on video and in pictures.

Sincerely,

Robert Mizrahi
CEO
Chaos Commandos