Follow these steps to manage and protect your smartphone photos and other images, so you can revisit your favorite travel destinations time and again.
Like most people, I’d rather be taking travel photos than organizing them. But stuck at home with nowhere to go, tackling that long-overdue task seemed like a good way to satisfy my wanderlust. Until I started counting …
More than 20,000 in my iPhone, 5,000 on Google Drive and DropBox, six file boxes of prints–and more photos scattered across other devices. Help!
“Photo organizing is overwhelming for everyone,” says professional photo organizer Cathi Nelson, CEO and founder of Hartford, Connecticut–based The Photo Managers.
Smartphones have made it possible to obsessively document every aspect of our lives and travels to the tune of 1.2 trillion photos a year worldwide, according to market research firm InfoTrends. Not surprisingly, our camera rolls and closets are bursting at the seams.
“The average person has 15,000 to 25,000 photos on their phone–not to mention 10,000 print photos stashed away somewhere,” according to Nelson, author of the self-published book Photo Organizing Made Easy (2017). “Some even have 20,000 photos from just one trip!”
While most of us prefer exploring the world to tending bits and bytes, there’s a good reason to manage that mountain of memories right now: If your phone is lost, broken, or stolen, or if an external hard drive crashes or your home is subject to a natural disaster, you could lose precious memories forever.
Plus, organizing travel photos can be fun. Sorting through photos of a babymoon in Hawai‘i or a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Seychelles lets you relive happy travel times–and plan for new ones. It’ll also be easier to revisit your favorite memories time and again.
Ready to take charge of your photos? Here are six expert tips to get it done.