Hellobee Boards

Following! I have maybe... 4,000 of my 10 month old!

I'm a photographer, so yeah, I have 3,765.284 photos! Ha.

I open an app that allows me to star or rate the photos. I go through quickly and give the keepers a star. Then, I pick all of the unrated photos and delete them. I don't question it, I just go with it. Otherwise, I would need off-site storage.

Then, I do a monthly print with Postal Pix for my phone photos and a monthly print with Shutterfly for 4x6 prints from our camera.

All prints go into a 12x12 album (for each year). I got the sleeves and albums from scrapbooks.com. The brand is Memories R Us or something cheesy like that.

@Mrs. Champagne: I have it, but I don't use it much and they are typically just iphone pics instead of the better dslr pics. I need some way to print and organize all the photos on my laptop.

My step-MIL makes like 4 scrapbooks per year still. It's too much. We never even look at them because it is just overwhelming. I would just aim for doing 1 album per year. Save what makes you smile or what you want to specifically remember. But don't try to use everything. We can't try to hop onto EVERY memory in print-- it's just too much. I like blurb for albums.

Ugh this is such a problem for me. As for deleting, I try to go through when I see a bunch that look almost the same and delete all but 1-2. You know... when LO is sitting there eating and being really cute and most shots are blurry, several have the exact same face, etc. As for making a photo book I know it will take me so long (because I'm a perfectionist like PPs) but want to do them someday - goal is 0-6 mos, 6-12 mos, then annually for each LO.

I am very organized about my photos but sometimes wonder why I'm doing it when I haven't really done anything with them. In case it helps anyone, I use Adobe Lightroom for my photos. I can import them from my phone, hubby's phone, iPads, and cameras. There is a learning curve but its not too challenging to get started. The program does cost money but I really like it and if you're involved in education (teacher, student) there are good discounts. Anyway I thought I'd throw that out there.

Here here! I am out of control! No solutions unfortunately but I am hoping to get an iPhone with more storage.

My husband purges our photos when he uploads them from the camera. He is very picky about the final product, so it helps us weed out from the beginning. And he takes a ton of photos at a time, but will end up with one or two good shots.

I also do a traditional photo album per year, 300 photos and that is it. I find it much easier to manage than a printed photo book.

@Anagram: shutterfly has a site called my life.com that offers the ability to star photos and it integrates with shutterfly to order prints. I like it a lot but there are storage limits for the free version. I am currently debating paying for the upgraded version.

@78h2o: I am a photo hoarder too! I have realized though that I love having albums to look at so I am trying hard to pare down and get then done. It's helping me that I came up with a plan for my photos. I decided to do one project life album for our family each year, in the future the style may change but I want one book for the year. I am doing a photo a day of our baby and posting it to Instagram to do a set of chatbooks. I haven't ordered yet but I figured if I find like the quality after the first one I will switch gears and upload then elsewhere. I am also doing 8*8 shutterfly books of special events, her newborn photos, Christmas, vacations etc.

It sort of sounds like a lot but the photo a day helps me cull my photos daily, I go through all of them each day and delete the blurry or otherwise awful ones. I should delete the duplicates and save only the best few but I can't bring myself to do it yet!

The 8*8 books I see as icing on the cake so I don't fret if I don't get to them but I am glad when I do.

One other thing I have toyed with is doing a slideshow style thing that I can share with family online and that would help me sort out the keepers from the trash too.

Long story short, I think having s project (or five) associated with paring down helps be remember my goal and stick to it.

i try to go through my pictures on the camera every 1 or 2 weeks. i'm pretty ruthless with deleting pictures. if they're blurry or not great, they're gone (there are a few exceptions, but rarely). i email a choice few (or 5 or 10) to my family when i go through these sessions. i have yet to make an album though, which i need to do!

@Mrs. Champagne: Thanks for the reply! I need to get moving on some chat books.... I'm about 4 years behind on family photo albums.

@mrskc: Oh I love the idea of keeping a faves folder for each month! That sounds ideal - and I will look into backing up those to dropbox. How do you identify these in lightroom? The only marker (stars, colors etc) I frequently use is that I color pics red when I'm quickly going through, then go back later and delete all the red pics.

@mrskc: Interesting. I keep all my Lightroom photos on a separate hard drive. The program is so powerful and I keep thinking I'm not using the full potential! I love it though. I think I will start using more of the sorting features - I like your idea of marking favorites and might try doing those as a "collection".

@sunny: I guess, how else will I separate them out? Unless you know a better way?! I don't want to delete ALL of my photos. So like some xmas pics I took of the kids. I had like 30 altogether but picked out maybe like 5 or so favorites. I don't want to delete the other 25 pics but I want to easily find the favorites and have them separate. Then I can just upload my favorites folders to Shutterfly to make my yearly photo book and just backup favorites so I'm not backing up tens of thousands of photos. Does that make sense? Or is there a better way?

@shellio: I'm sure I'm not using lightroom to it's full potential. I only just learned of tagging photos from another thread on HB recently.

@sunny: ok I see. Yeah I didn't even know I could do that in LR. lol I did notice I could rate photos. I'll have to look into it. Maybe try it out and see what method I like. So I backup all my photos to an external hard drive. But to dropbox I only backup favs because of space constraints. How do you backup?

@mrskc: @sunny: I tag all of my photos with keywords too, as I import them. It is tedious but totally worth it for exactly what sunny described, when I go back and make annual calendars for the family it is super easy to find pics of the specific person I am looking for. Ok, now I'm inspired to start using ratings. And smart collections. What a great idea!

mrskc - There are lots of plug ins you can use for lightroom and I'm sure Shutterfly has one. I know smugmug does and that's what I use, also facebook and flickr have them. Then light room can upload directly too the photo site.