Best way to organize baby photos

If your criterion for organizing pictures is events and you have a baby, you will soon discover that your folder structure doesn’t support baby pictures well. If I want to use “events” as the criterion, then all my baby pictures folders would read something like 06_06_15-home or 06_06_17-park . I would have hundreds of folders like that in the first year for my daughter. This doesn’t really make much sense and would create lots of problems when trying to look for specific pictures.

When you want to organize baby photos, you do it the same way as organizing any other digital photo…with one small difference: quantity. When children are born we tend to take lots and lots more pictures every single day. In addition, their changes are visible week to week. For babies, change is the main event in their first few years of life.

Baby photos need more organization

My baby daughter was changing very, very, very quickly…so I was taking lots pictures every day for at least the first six months. So, I quickly realized that I would have to go one level deeper in my folder structure. It seemed very natural that I would add an extra layer of folders for each month. So, my folders look like the example below. You can easily notice that I have added an extra layer of folders for each month. I believe the easiest thing you can do is to add another sub-for each month as illustrated below. This way it will be a lot easier to locate your pictures later.

Assuming that you’re relying on folders alone for your organization…what can you do to help your folder structure cope with a new flood of pictures? This article will give you some help in that direction.

»My Pictures
» Child's_name
  »2006
    »2006-07-first-weeks
      »2006-07-14-birth
      »2006-07-15-hospital
      »2006-07-16-going-home
      »2006-07-17-at-home
      »2006-07-18-sleeping
    »2006-08-one-month
      »2006-08-14-one-month-birthday
      »2006-08-15-park-day
    »2006-09-two-months
      »2006-09-14-two-months-today
  »2007
    »2007-01-five-months
      »2007-01-14-five-months-today
      »2007-01-18-cold-outside
    »2007-02-six-months
      »2007-01-14-studio-pictures
  »Videos
    »2006
    »2007

How about baby videos?

Another thing that you will do for sure is to take lots of videos. Personally, I was taking a lot more photos than videos. I tried separating the videos from the photos but then they would be harder to find and that didn’t make sense since the videos were related to the photos. Thus, I changed my direction and decided to place both photos and videos from the same event in the same folder. Makes a lot more sense.

Essentials for organizing your digital photos

Here are the essential products and services I have come to rely on for many years to keep my media collection organized and safe. Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Excellent Lightroom and Picasa alternative. If you need a cheaper and simpler photo manager then ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac (save 20% until Feb 15) or ACDSee Pro for Windows (save $20 until Feb 15) is my preferred solution for organizing all my media. It has a very fast browser, great image editing and it's simple to use.

If you do a lot of image editing like I do, I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC via the annual Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom has best photo editing capabilities even though it comes with a steeper learning curve. If you do image editing, Adobe Lightroom is my favorite.

I recommend Backblaze Cloud Backup for affordable & reliable unlimited cloud backup. I have been using Backblaze for backing up all pictures & videos for more than 5 years now. All my invaluable digital memories are safe and secure. This is the best solution especially if you have a large quantity of media files.

Use a reliable & affordable external hard drive for backing up everything on your computer. It is absolutely essential for keeping all your memories backed up and safe.

Start organizing now using detailed, step-by-step instructions and videos:
Personal Coaching (closed) Independent Course Private Lessons
Reference book Basics book Picasa book

YOURS FREE! 10 crucial steps most people miss when organizing their digital photos

Most people want to just organize their digital pictures and ignore these crucial steps right at the beginning...when they are shooting and transferring their digital pictures. Then they wonder why they can't organize their digital photos! Avoid most people's mistakes and start on the right track!

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