Understand and manage your hardware devices

With every complex project planning is essential to success. Organizing your pictures is a complex process, especially if there are lots of pictures and the current structure is chaotic. Therefore a good plan is essential to a good outcome when you embark on starting to organize your pictures. The first step in putting together a great plan is to understand your hardware components and their current purposes. Next you need to assess if some of your hardware devices need to be re-purposed. Read on to find out some easy questions to ask for determining where to start.

A great plan starts with some goals

During the beginning of my online course I pursue three goals with my students. Before we go anywhere further with organizing our pictures, we start with these three goals that have to do mainly with my students’ hardware devices.

Firstly, you must identify which hardware device servers as your main photo storage area.

Most people that take my course have pictures scattered over multiple devices. So, the first exercise I have my students do is to look at their devices and identify the one device where they want to store all their pictures.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t have pictures on any other device, but rather you need one place that you can call the “gold” copy, meaning that all the pictures stored on any other device are copies of pictures from the “master” storage area.

Identifying your “master” storage area for your digital photos is a must first step for a great photo organization system.

Secondly, you must identify a backup device that will backup your “gold” or “master” storage area.

Most likely it is an external drive or maybe another computer. This device will contain an exact copy of your “master” area. For most of the people in my course, this step is pretty easy to do.

Thirdly, you need a plan for your new pictures

You need to ensure that any new pictures will end up in the “master” storage area in the appropriate place so that you do not create duplicates everywhere. This is where all my students need help, so we spend quite a bit of time during the course to get this right. Everyone’s setup is different, so the details are slightly different for everyone.

However, the goal here is the same for everyone: we need a way to make sure our “master” storage area contains all our pictures and does not contain any duplicates.

Identify primary hardware devices

Your primary hardware devices are your photo sources, your main photo storage area and your photo backup area. They are usually easy to identify but sometimes you have to think a while to figure them out.

1. Your photo sources.  This would be your camera, your phone, your scanner or your tablet.
2. Your main storage area. This is where you store all your pictures.your photo storage repository. It can be your laptop your desktop or an external drive. You also need to get more specific as to what drive on your computer if you have multiple.
3. Your backup area. Most likely this is an external drive, but it can also be an internal drive. Thee main idea here is to find one device that will act as your backup. If I were to ask you where do you backup your pictures you should be able to say it right away.

Identify secondary hardware devices

Your secondary devices can be photo sources and photo display devices. The main difference between your primary and secondary devices is that your primary devices hold the “gold” copy of your pictures or the originals. Your secondary hardware devices should only hold copies of your originals. In other words, your secondary devices should not contain any original photos not found on the “gold” primary photo storage area.

Identify your secondary devices

1. Other devices where you store pictures.  Maybe a laptop, or two laptops, a tablet where you have some pictures, a mobile phone, etc.  These are devices that you sometimes use to store pictures.
2. A portable device that you take with you when you travel and use it to store pictures you take when you travel.  This could be a laptop, tablet or a netbook.
3. A portable backup device for backing up your pictures when you travel.

Questions that will help you identify your hardware components

1. How many computers do you have?
2. What are their purposes?
3. Do you store pictures on them?
4. Which devices have pictures that are not on any other device?
5. How many hard drives do you have in each computer?
6. What are their sizes and how much free space do you have?
7. How many external drives do you have, how much space total and how much free space do you have?
8. How many mobile devices do you have?
9. What are their purposes?
10. Do you store pictures on them? Do you take pictures with them?

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 30% until May 24th) or ACDSee Pro for Windows (save $30 until May 24th) 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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