Celebrating 50 years of Marriage Sharing Photos – Part 2

This is my parents with their grandchildren. One of the many photos as a result of our week long family gathering celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. Last week I shared with you the process for taking steps to share photos after a group event. Dropbox was my tool of choice and this week I am sharing with you some additional steps to manage your photos once they are uploaded (in Dropbox).

1. Keep the best, delete the rest!  Yes, I said it – delete some of the photos. We are all a little snap happy with this digital technology and I can guarantee you do not need all the photos that you took. This should be a quick process eliminating blurry, misfired shots, and excessive duplicates – do you really need 15 shots of the waterfall…keep the best delete the rest.
2. Organize. When you set up dropbox you identified a shared folder for everyone to upload their photos. Now you need to make sub-folders and organize the photos into these. Go to your folder, click on it, and where it reads name (at the top of the menu) right click and you will see the option to add a new folder. Name your sub-folders by theme and keep the names general so that a majority of the photos fall into the categories you name. For our trip to Sunriver I made eight sub-folders: Swimming, Hiking, Family Photos, Games, ect… Give yourself permission for a miscellaneous folder. A rule of thumb that I follow is only make a sub-folder if there are at least 10 photos tied to the theme. Move your photos into the sub-folders. Be sure to c lick on the file row to the right of the file’s name to select it. (Clicking on the file name or icon will open the file as a preview.) Hold the Shift key and then click on or use the up/down arrows on your keyboard to select another file in the file browser.
3. Stories. Using dropbox to document your photo stories is not really that practical, however, it can certainly be used to rename your photos. Be sure to give your photos a name versus leaving the image name – DSC78493.jpg. I keep it simple and describe photos in 5 words or less ALWAYS including the date and a who-what-where information: YYY-MM-DD-Norton Family-Perko-50th-Wedding-Anniversary-Sunriver-Oregon.
4. Share. The reason we take photos is to capture the special moments for a lifetime of enjoyment and also to share them with our family and friends. Dropbox has a feature that allows you to share the photos with anyone. Right click on the photos you want to share and either share the link or use the dropbox feature of emailing directly. I found the link share to be much more reliable and you can share multiple files this way too.

Dropbox is an excellent tool to keep your photos safe. However, if you do not take care managing your photos within the tool you will end up feeling overwhelmed and photos are meant to be enjoyed and shared. Following the above steps will help you be successful.  If you need help managing your digital photo collections please feel free to contact me or comment below with any questions.