How I Manage Our Personal Photos

Why is it that when someone’s a pro at something we want to know how they do normal things? Okay, follow me here. When I follow food bloggers or professional chefs on instagram, I want to know but what do you cook on a normal night? Can’t be that awesome all the time can it? Or when someone is a professional designer, I want to know how they styled their own home. So since I’m a photog, I’m always curious on how other photogs handle their personal photos! How do you take them? How do you store them? Are you curious about what I do for our family?

I keep my camera nearby as much as possible.

Yes, I take a ridiculous amount of images with my cell phone (I mean, who doesn’t?), but I also like to grab some with the “big” camera as we call it. Ours is stored in a spot in our living room away from little hands and eyes, but within easy reach for me. I keep it ready to go with a card in it so that I can easily pick it up and go. The settings are set to what I know takes good images in my own home (based on our lighting, etc). If you are into the technical, I keep my 50mm on my camera for shots at home so that I can set my aperture higher. And always autofocus on AI Servio because the boys are always moving!

I pull images off once a week or so.

So since I take it out every once in a while, I try to take those images off the camera and put them on a folder on my computer for later editing. I shoot in RAW so my images need to be adjusted before being in final format. I take A LOT, so my best advice here for culling (aka removing what you don’t want) is to actually only pull over what you LOVE. So I may shoot 5 of a similar shot, but I pick the best of the 5 and only move one over. Its pretty easy to go through quickly and then pull over only what I love.

I store our images in folders by years.

I used to do one for each of the boys, but as our family changes and things go on, I found it easier to just store images by the year. Within that folder I have sub folders for things like Christmas pictures or a folder for their birthdays. This makes it easier to locate the images I’m looking for too. If its just an everyday image it’ll be in the main folder and if I’m thinking about something, like say the big littles second birthday, I know what year to find it in!

I edit and then delete the RAW images.

Ugh, I know. RAW images are the best! No way! But honestly, for our family photos, most of the time I don’t need the RAWs. I edit what I need to and then I can clear up the space. For professional images, however, I always save the RAW images!

I try not to have too much visual clutter.

Stay with me here. I’m a picture hoarder. For real. I never ever want to delete. But for our own personal images, I found that I’m more likely to actually look through them if I don’t have too many of the same kind. So for example, if Ben and Dave were playing outside, and I took 50 images, I’ll probably only keep like 3. Enough to remember the memory, grab some smiles and then toss the rest. This way I can move on and not weighed down by image overload.

PRINT THEM!

I can’t say enough about this one. Print. We have an entire hallways full of images. I love them. We have three frames in the living room that I switch out images in and we get an updated family standout image as much as possible. I love seeing my family on the walls of my home. (I also love art, I have both!) What happens to the old standouts? Well so far they are ending up in our hallway. They were a special time in our lives and I think that images never go out of style, they are memories for later. So by all means, print your images, even if they were just with your cell phone. PRINT THEM!

Hope you enjoyed reading about how we do our family pictures around here! If you want a beautiful family image of your family, let me know! I can help with that and with printed images. You’ll never regret it!