Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
057: Organising your digital photos
1.1k Plays2 years ago
If you’re looking for the motivation, apps, and process to get your digital photos sorted once and for all, this ep where we interview Carly Michael is for you.
About Carly MichaelCarly Michael has spent her whole life surrounded by photos having grown up in her family's camera store - Michaels Camera Video and Digital in Melbourne's CBD. When covid hit, the family decided to close the store so she took the opportunity to become a professional photo organiser - something she had developed a passion for during her time managing the family's photo lab. She now spends her days organising both physical and digital photos, helping people get back in control of their photo mess!
Digital photos made the top five life admin pain points in our 2021 community survey and while Dinah has had her photos sorted for some time until we recorded this ep Mia felt like there would never be enough time or motivation in the world for her to get her photos into a format that other people can actually access and enjoy.
After the interview Mia downloaded the apps suggested, they did their magic, and her photos are finally organised.
Carly starts the interview by talking about her background and how she became interested in the digital dark age. The digital dark age is a concern that, as technology advances, we will lose access to photos and other data as our current media (including hard drives and USBs) are not designed to last.
Mia and Carly discuss how setting yourself a deadline and having a photo project as a goal will give you the motivation
Carly discussed the key characteristics of an organised photosystem being:
- organised - chronologically is the easiest
- centralised
- accessible - ideally on your phone
- backed up (consider the 3-2-1 system - 3 copies of your photos, stored in 2 locations with 1 of those being off site)
Carly discusses the risks around cloud storage (eg Google's recent change to its terms and conditions that states If you're inactive for two years Google may delete the content. She also discusses the importance of distinguishing between a back-up and a sync.
The key steps to get your photos organised are:
- Gather - Make a list of all your photos (including on devices and in the cloud)and gather them into one physical location
- Centralise - Put all your digital photos into a central hub - ideally using a hard drive. If you have issues extracting photos consider using Dropbox. It is also useful as a backup
- Back Up - Carly recommends using BackBlaze
- Deduplicate - Get rid of duplicates - Carly recommends using Photosweeper for a Mac and Duplicate Cleaner Pro for a PC
- Organise your photos (folderise them) - Carly recommends using Big Mean Folder Machine for Macs and Photomove for PC. If you run into issues with dates you can use Adobe Bridge to assist with finding the original dates
- Maintain - consider using dropbox to make a backup of your photos from your phone (not a sync) until you reorganise them. Then create a habit (perhaps by pairing with another regular task) to make sure you oragnise your folders on a regular basis. Also consider changing your behaviour to curate your collection as you go. Adopt the same mindset as you had when you took photos with film.
Carly also discusses scanning hardcopy photos - noting that if you are going to scan photos you want to scan once and to the quality you want. You can scan photos using your phone with apps such as photomyne, however, the quality will be limited. She notes that if you are going to scan you want to organise as you scan.
<Recommended
Transcript
Energy Saving Tips from Georgia Power
00:00:00
Speaker
Sometimes we forget how easy it is to save energy at home. So Georgia Power is here with a little reminder, because it's often as simple as a twist to switch to LED bulbs or as easy as a lift to move furniture away from air vents. It could be the flip of a switch to turn off the lights in an empty room. One way or another, these small changes can make a big difference, helping you save energy for the bigger things in life.
Efficient Life Administration Techniques
00:00:24
Speaker
Visit georgapower.com slash energy efficiency for tips and programs to help save energy and money.
00:00:30
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony.
00:00:43
Speaker
I'm Dinero Roberts, an operations manager who loves sending photos to people as a way of bringing back the joy of shared memories. I'm Mia Nothropf, a researcher and writer who ran out of steam making photo books by my daughter's third birthday. She's now
Digital Photo Management with Carly Michael
00:00:58
Speaker
10. In this episode, we interview professional photo organizer and photographer Carly Michael from PhotoGenie, who grew up in her family's fifth generation camera store. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks.
00:01:11
Speaker
Digital Photos made the top five life admin pain points in our 2021 community survey. One of three people feel like their digital photos are out of control and they're trying to manage chaos. And while Dinah has had her photos sorted for some time, I can definitely relate to this feeling of chaos.
00:01:31
Speaker
At the time of recording this interview, which was now a few months ago, it felt like there would never be enough time or motivation in the world for me to actually get my photos into a format that other people could access and enjoy. And I guess I knew like other life admin, intractable life admin issues, that this could be conquered. I'd be determined to crack this nut. And after this interview, I downloaded the app, Sakali suggested, they did their magic. And I'm proud and relieved to say that my photos
00:02:01
Speaker
are finally organized. Amazing.
Risks and Backup Strategies for Digital Memories
00:02:05
Speaker
So in this episode we talked to Carly Michael who revealed the threat of the digital dark ages and failing to safely preserve our memories and history. The best apps to deduplicate and organize your photos in chronological order, the 3-2-1 backup rule
00:02:21
Speaker
and that the best backup method is actually to print your photos. If you're looking for motivation, apps, and process to get your photos sorted once and for all, this app is for you.
00:02:35
Speaker
Carly, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. It's so good to be here. It's a bit of a running joke between Mia and I that been an area of life admin that Mia and I have both struggled with. And in fact, Mia is still struggling to get on top of her digital photos. And we also, we know it's a really common pain point of our listeners. So.
00:02:55
Speaker
Thanks so much for making the time to give us your expertise. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. So I guess let's begin with your history with photos. What's your relationship with photos? Oh my god, my life is a photo.
00:03:10
Speaker
So I was born into a family that's cameras were my world. My surname's Michael. If you're from Melbourne, you might know Michael's camera, video and digital. I'm the fifth generation to work in that camera store. Well, it didn't start as a camera store, but we've been in the same location for over a hundred years. And sadly, at the start of 2021, 2021, we closed because of COVID.
00:03:38
Speaker
But I grew up in a camera store, so my whole life was photographed. Every moment of mine was documented. I have a love-hate relationship with photos and cameras. Wow. That's amazing to have such a family connection to photos. I was curious, so what did it, when it first opened five generations ago, what was it? Was it a place you went and had your photo taken?
00:04:04
Speaker
We actually started as a gunsmith. So we built the building in 1916. It actually took three years to build, which fascinates me because that means that we actually started building. We were building during World War I and we opened up as a gunsmith in a porn store. And the joke's always been in our, like, that we've been shooting people.
00:04:24
Speaker
But then it actually became a pharmacy in 1924. My great grandfather was a pharmacist and then my grandfather was a pharmacist. And there was a big correlation between like pharmacies used to sell chemicals to develop film. So that's why they went hand in hand together. And then my grandfather had a love of cameras.
00:04:44
Speaker
So at one point in the shop, there was a line dividing the pharmacy and the camera store. And then in 1976, we became a dedicated camera store. So many people in Melbourne bought their first cameras from Michaels. Yeah. Yeah. I'm one of those people. It was a big trip.
00:05:02
Speaker
I'd saved up, I was going to get my first proper camera and been researching it and off I went to Michael's and it had such a distinctive yellow, you know, yellow facade. It was yellow in the 80s, yeah. Interestingly, I'm now, and I'll get to it soon, I'm a photo organiser now, but my first project was the history of Michael's when we turned 100 and we had this room that was locked. My dad said never go in there, but I went in.
00:05:27
Speaker
And it was full of our Michael's history and all disorganized photos. And I had to identify the disorganized photos by clues. So one was I knew in the 80s, the shot was yellow. That's how I could pull together all those photos. Well, it feels like we're all drowning in so much photo material now.
00:05:51
Speaker
that what you had to do physically in going into a room and looking at all of that stuff, we are all now having to do digitally. And you talk about the digital dark age.
Vint Cerf's Digital Dark Age
00:06:00
Speaker
Can you explain what that is?
00:06:02
Speaker
I worked in and out of the shop my whole life, probably starting officially when I was 16. I worked in the lab, processing film and photos. But basically from when I was 21, I started working full time. I sold cameras, I worked in insurance, I worked in admin. And then after I finished studying photography at university, I went back to the shop.
00:06:24
Speaker
And I started working customer service in our imaging department, which is where we speak to the customers to take in their orders about film processing and printing and scanning. Then I became the lab manager. Then I managed the whole department. I also managed the education department. So I was teaching.
00:06:41
Speaker
photography and lightroom. And yeah, I was really lucky that every year I used to go to conferences in the US. I used to go to, it was for independent photo lab managers, a conference for us, like really niche, but amazing. We used to geek out about our scanners and our printers and film and
00:07:00
Speaker
I became known, this was like during 2015, 16, 17, and film was having a resurgence. So I used to be invited to speak about the resurgence of film. And then I was invited to speak about scanning and I went on a bit of a research rabbit hole and discovered big issue, like the digital dark age.
00:07:22
Speaker
Yeah, top us through that. What's the digital dark page? So that's a term that was coined by a guy named Vint Cerf, who was one of the architects and founders of the internet and is now the vice president of Google. And well, it's basically a description of the time we're in now.
00:07:38
Speaker
where we're the most photographed generation by far, but we're likely to be forgotten because of this digital dark age. And so the dark ages were the years 500 to 1500, like 1000 years, I did the, I calculated maybe 40 generations where there's no
00:07:56
Speaker
There's no documentation. We actually don't know what happened in that time. And it's not that long ago. It was only 500 years ago that this period has been missing. And it's called the Dark Age. As I said, there's no data about it. And so what the digital Dark Age is, is this period of time where we're likely to be
00:08:16
Speaker
forgotten because our digital photos aren't designed to last. They're not, like our hard drives, for example, they're designed to last three to five years. One of the most biggest problems or, you know, that I speak to professional photographers about is that they're hard, like they've lost data because the hard drives have crashed. Our CDs, they're only designed to last 10 years. Even though we're taking a lot, a lot of photos, if we're not managing our photos, we're literally at risk of losing them.
00:08:43
Speaker
It's really interesting because my first child was born at a time when I still printed out photos and then my second child was born and there's not one photo printed of him, like on paper. It's all, so he's going to be the one forgotten in our family. My daughter will live on. The legacy, that feels, yeah, I think that's played out in lots of families where it's funny because as a parent, like I have maybe like three photo albums that cover my entire childhood.
00:09:13
Speaker
Then by the time my daughter was three, I'd already made her three photo books because we've captured every single thing she's ever done. And then I run out of steam and haven't made one since. So it's really common for people to print photos and make photo books of the first child and then second, third, fourth. It just falls by the wayside. Yeah, I guess I'm not alone. For many people, organizing their photos feels like this Herculean task and they can procrastinate about it for years.
00:09:42
Speaker
So what's a useful headspace to get into when you're thinking, all right, I need to address my photo collection. What mindset should I be taking on? I think the most powerful thing you can do is to set yourself a deadline and have some type of small project.
Chronological Photo Organization
00:10:00
Speaker
So maybe it's for an anniversary or a birthday that you want to put together. Most people want to put together a photo book, but you can't put a photo book together unless you can find the photos.
00:10:11
Speaker
So it has a snowball effect, but having that deadline, having a goal, a clear goal, is going to give you the power to follow through with the project. Because otherwise there's no urgency. It's a really good point because I haven't given myself deadlines. It all felt very arbitrary.
00:10:30
Speaker
So Carly, in order to get those photos together, you need to have an organization system. So what are the characteristics of a good organized photo collection? Okay, so no one system or method is the best, but I would say the chronological ordering of photos chronologically is definitely the easiest.
00:10:49
Speaker
especially because all the digital photos have all the information you need embedded in the files. A lot of people like to organize their folders by themes as well, but that definitely is more manual. The other thing that you really want is for everything to be centralized in one place.
00:11:06
Speaker
So that way you can find them all. You also want them to be accessible. So the idea is you want to be able to find that photo. You want to be able to find it on your phone. You don't want to necessarily wait till you have it on your computer next to you.
00:11:21
Speaker
A really, really important thing is that everything is backed up. So we have in the photo organizers world, we speak about the 3-2-1 backup method. And what that means is having three copies of your photos stored in two locations and one of those locations being offsite.
00:11:41
Speaker
So that could be, for example, one copy on your computer and two copies on two different cloud services. Maybe it's one copy on an external hard drive, another copy on another external hard drive. And one copy in the cloud could be a print of everything and a copy in the cloud and a copy on the computer. Maybe one of those external hard drives at the office.
00:12:04
Speaker
If you don't like using the cloud, but it's, it isn't really important to have three copies. And it's, it goes back to what I was saying before is that the media, the hard drive media is not designed to last and also cloud services, for example.
00:12:20
Speaker
At the moment, most of them are designed, they're created for profit. They're not really looking there for the user. It's actually a really important point to bring up. A lot of people missed this last year, but December 2020, Google sent out quite a number of emails.
00:12:36
Speaker
telling us about their change in policy and Basically what happened like the cloud is the cloud seems all magical everything's gonna be safe in the cloud But the cloud really is a series of hard drives in a like a hard drive farm somewhere where you can't see them so they need the hard drives are replaced continuously and their air condition to keep the temperature down like the rooms and
00:13:00
Speaker
And basically Google has said enough, you know, we can't store all your stuff there anymore. Like it's, we're running out of capacity. So Google actually changed their policy. It was effective June 1, 2021. And they're now saying on their free accounts,
00:13:17
Speaker
If you are inactive for two years in Gmail, Google Drive or Google Photos, they're reserving the right to delete your photos. So basically what that's saying is in like from 2023, if you haven't opened an old email, if you haven't even opened an old photo, Google's going to reserve the right to delete it.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah. And so we're literally at the doorstep of this digital dark age. Like it's a bit frightening. And so not many people are talking about this. So I believe it's really important to actually extract the photos from Google, from iCloud. iCloud also have in their terms and conditions.
00:13:56
Speaker
that they say very clearly, this is not a backup, you should have your photos somewhere else. And I guess it's also then just want to add one more thing. It's really important to understand the difference between a backup and a sync because most of the popular services that we use are actually syncs.
00:14:11
Speaker
like photo synchronization tools rather than photo backup tools. What that means, backup is a one-way street. So when you back something up, it stays there. Even if you delete it from one device, you'll still have a copy in the place where you backed it up. But a sync is a two-way street. So if you delete photos from one device, let's say your phone in iCloud, it'll also delete from your iPad. The iCloud and Google, they're syncs.
00:14:39
Speaker
not backups. And so you see the photos simultaneously between all your libraries. So ultimately, even though you might see your photo on your iPad, on your phone, and you log into iCloud and see it on your computer, so you see it in three locations, it's actually considered one. So it's totally okay to use a sync system, but as long as you have additional backups in place. Oh, some really big things to think about in terms of the security of our photos.
00:15:07
Speaker
Before we move on, that makes me think about what came up for me then was Y2K, that kind of rushed the whole world, be like, oh my God, June, 2023 is approaching, rush everybody to your various Google accounts.
00:15:23
Speaker
Either activate them, enable them, or get the stuff out of there. Oh man. Yeah. It's like, I, when I, I read this, I've known about the digital dark age for maybe five years. I've speak publicly about it. I've got on my website, like I've got webinars about it. Like I'm like, who else is talking about it? Like what's going on? I need an army of people to save the photos.
00:15:44
Speaker
Okay, so where do we begin? Yeah, where do we start? What's our first step? I think in your approach, you talk about gathering. So what does that actually involve? Okay, so the reason why we're so overwhelmed by our digital photos is that they're scattered everywhere. You know, you might have backups and backups. And if you're like me, like I was also a professional photographer, grew up in a camera store. I have a lot of photos like you can't even imagine.
00:16:10
Speaker
I was taught or my dad encouraged me to when I took photos on my digital cameras not even to delete the photos off the memory cards just to buy new ones and that would serve as a backup. So I've just got a lot of photos. So what you want to do is you want to start by making a list of all the places where your digital photos are and then gathering them into one location, one physical location.
00:16:33
Speaker
And I always say, you can't manage what you can't measure.
Collecting and Organizing Digital Photos
00:16:37
Speaker
Once everything is in one place, then you kind of group like items together. And I know I'm a bit of an extreme. I've got everything. I've got old mobile phones, old computers, hard drives, memory cards, CDs, DVDs. I even have floppy disks. And I've worked with a lot of people and I seem to have a lot more than others. But, you know, like there are a lot of different types of devices. You can have your photos.
00:17:00
Speaker
So you bring them all into one place and also write down a list of where all your photos are online. Are they on Shutterfly? Are they on Dropbox? Are they on OneDrive? Did you have a Flickr account? All those things. So once you kind of know what you've got, it's already more manageable because you can systematically then do the next stage, which is centralize your photos and put them all into one location.
00:17:24
Speaker
I like to call it the digital photo hub. So basically what I would recommend doing is taking a hard drive, a high capacity one. The Dimer does it nowadays. You know, two terabytes usually enough, but maybe five terabytes. And you systematically copy all the photos from one location onto the one hard drive.
00:17:44
Speaker
I use like a sticker once I've copied, once I've taken the photos like cleared the USB, I put like an orange dot on it and that's my indication this one is done. And that's first thing you're doing is already creating a backup because you're making a second copy but we're centralizing it onto one hard drive and even if it's a disorganized mess, simply having the photos in one place will instantly help you feel less overwhelmed because now you have one hard drive, that's a mess. That's where I'm at. This is the step where I've got to.
00:18:11
Speaker
I've got everything at least onto the hard drive. And then I was like, okay, let's just take a moment. Perfect. No, that's great. The next thing you want to do, and this is a really important step, is to back it up, right? And there's a few ways to do that. The photo organizes, I'm part of an association. So there's like a group of maybe 600 of us.
00:18:32
Speaker
around the world, mainly censored in America, very active. We're all sharing information. You think it's hard as an everyday person to manage your photos. As a professional, it's really hard as well. There's so many nuances and technical things that go wrong, like it's mind blowing. So we're very active and supportive, but very popular in the photo organizing world is a backup service called Backblaze.
Effective Backup and De-duplication Tools
00:18:55
Speaker
I highly recommend getting onto backblades. It's unlimited storage and it's happening all the time. So I have my computer set up on backblades. So I always know that my photos are going to the cloud and not my photos, everything I have is going always to the cloud.
00:19:14
Speaker
And then I also have a time machine going on my Mac so that my computer's always, you know, if something was to happen, and my computer did die recently, maybe two months ago, and I was just able to recover everything. I actually got it from Backblaze and just could keep going. But you want to back up your photos and then you want to get rid of the duplicates.
00:19:34
Speaker
Okay. It's such a big problem, the duplicates. This is the thing. This is the thing. Yeah. Now, you know when you talked about the first step, gathering them all together and feeling less overwhelmed? That's when I actually felt the most overwhelmed because I'm like, oh my God, I have like 32,000 photos. How am I ever going to get to the bottom of it? And finding the duplicates, I guess, was one thing that relieved some of that stress because then I realized I actually don't have 32,000 photos I have.
00:20:00
Speaker
many copies of the same photo. Did you mind me asking, how did you find the duplicates? Like what, what do people do? I'm curious. I have an answer. So I used, I think it's an app called Photo Sweeper. Is that what it's called? And that helped get rid of quite a lot, quite quickly. So that was a big win for me.
00:20:21
Speaker
That's, and that's exactly what I'm going to recommend. If you're a Mac user, Photo Sweeper is the way to go. Basically, it's amazing. It scans your photos. I'm adding this to my to-do list as we speak. Photo Sweeper for Mac and duplicate cleaner pro for PC users. Basically what they do, they work in a similar way. They work how you tell it to work. So you do have to do a couple of different sweeps of your collection.
00:20:47
Speaker
But what you can tell it to do is scan all your photos and find the photos it thinks are duplicates. So for example, exact matches. So if you've made a backup, it'll find those photos and you can flag it and the software flags it for deletion. And then you kind of go over it yourself and check that it's done the right job. But you can also find similar photos or burst photos. If you've taken seven photos in a row, it can pick them out. Oh my God.
00:21:13
Speaker
That sounds like magic. It really is like magic. So you need to work the software. And I've actually been doing that recently to help me like get the collection a bit more manageable. So, you know, when you, particularly in the early days of the kids, I used to take like 27 photos of the same moment and that software helps me kind of identify them and then go, actually, I only need one photo of that moment. I don't need 27. So yeah, that's been huge. Yeah. So that's an amazing piece of software.
00:21:41
Speaker
You can actually put your iCloud or your Photos library directly into Photosweep or if you use Lightroom, it can also go in there and it can do the photosweeping inside the catalog or the library itself and put the duds or the deleted ones into a smart album and separate it. So it's very, very powerful.
00:22:03
Speaker
There are some caveats just to say photos from WhatsApp, for example, it's a really popular way we share photos, especially in Australia that strips the metadata. It takes away all the information about the photo. It also decreases the quality, but it will, if you put that into Photo Sweeper or any other piece of software that can read the metadata, it's going to give you the date that the photo was sent as opposed to the photo it was taken. So it's not an amazing way to share photos.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's really good to know because I'm often, if I'm out and about and someone takes a snap and I'm like, oh, can you share that with me? That'll be a good one. And they share it with me via WhatsApp. But if it's not getting any of that metadata, that's. Well, the thing is, if you take it that the same day. If it's taken that day, that'll be okay. I guess if it's a photo they're sharing from a different time. Exactly. Yeah. So it'll end up showing up on your, you know, in your timeline on the day that was received.
00:22:57
Speaker
The last thing you do, once you've done Photo Sweeper, then there's another piece of software. The last piece of the puzzle is to organize. You know, the photos have all the metadata in there, so you just need a piece of software that can reorganize them and put them into chronological order.
Chronological Organization Tools
00:23:13
Speaker
So there's two pieces of software, one for the Mac. It's called the Big Mean Folder Machine. Cue me writing down a note now. I am, yes.
00:23:22
Speaker
The big main folder machine. Definitely get onto that one. And in PC it's called PhotoMove. The Mac one works a little bit better than the PC one. They're both quite simple though and powerful programs. Basically you just dump all the photos in there and you tell the software how you want it to
00:23:40
Speaker
folderize the files and then it'll reorganize all those photos into maybe year or month and that's it so you've you've gathered all your photos into one place all of them doesn't matter if there's a hundred thousand or you know a million photos you get rid of the duplicates and then you just take all of that data pop it into the big mean folder machine and have it reorganize it into folders and then you've reset your digital life so we're laughing because if i just had
00:24:08
Speaker
My jaw just dropped. That's what that's about. So that's something that I do for people like and I call it literally a digital reset. So Carly, do you sometimes run into problems, though, with some of the metadata? So I guess what this is one of my challenges that in particular, the videos I imported into my Mac seem to have the date that they were imported into my Mac, not the date they were taken. So
00:24:34
Speaker
And they were taken like on an old digital camera with a video setting. So what do you do in that instance? Okay, so none of this software, I know it sounds like magic and it is, you do need to work the software. And there are a lot of things that aren't simple. So one is videos. Videos don't like to hold metadata.
00:24:54
Speaker
And it's something you actually have to do manually. There are tricks though. So when you look on finder on windows or windows explorer by default, it shows you the dates that you see. If you click on a file, it'll show you the date it was created and modified, but it's not actually the date, not the original date, even though it might be like correct inside the file.
00:25:20
Speaker
So a piece of free software is called Adobe Bridge. It's the only piece of Adobe software I think that's free. And when you look at files in Adobe Bridge, you actually see the real dates. And so sometimes you might need to view it that way and reorganize, recategorize and folderize your photos manually.
00:25:43
Speaker
So when I do use the big mean folder machine, there is like any photos that it can't organize, it puts into an others folder. Okay. Oh, that's awesome though. Like even knowing that there might be a hack to trying to find those dates, because at the moment that's kind of where it's been my blocker. Like I've got
00:26:02
Speaker
75, 80% of the way there and then struggled with the ones that were left over. So awesome. Yeah. No, I think that should spring show you forward. I'm loving the verb fold arise.
00:26:14
Speaker
So once you've done this, like you've got everything, it's pristine. You have this collection that is organized. It's up to date. It's de-duplicated. And then I guess it's like, what do I do now? I want to get them into photo books. I want to use them in some way. Yeah. And I guess also what about maintaining it so that it doesn't lose the folderization?
00:26:35
Speaker
Okay, that is a really good question. I'm really glad you brought that up. So you know how I said earlier that iCloud and Google Photos, they're just kind of one place where your photos are, and they're also difficult to extract. So in that gather phase, getting your photos out of Google Photos and iCloud is not easy. And it's
00:26:57
Speaker
real point of frustration for me but one way to get them out is actually to connect your camera to Dropbox and I don't have any affiliation with Dropbox it's not actually I find it sometimes a bit clunky but out of all the pieces of software that work with photos in Australia Dropbox is the best in terms of if you get a Dropbox account
00:27:24
Speaker
and you connect your phone with the camera, you can do a camera uploads. If you're on iCloud, it will actually go into your iCloud account and copy all of your iCloud photos full resolution into your camera uploads folder.
00:27:42
Speaker
as a backup because generally Dropbox is actually a sync so if you delete something from somewhere like on your computer it'll delete from the cloud but not the camera uploads part of Dropbox so the photos from your phone will go into Dropbox it'll also send all your old photos into Dropbox
00:28:02
Speaker
And it renames the files to be the date it was taken. What I would do with my digital reset clients is we'd extract the photos from Google or iCloud or whatever it is and merge them with all the other photos, organize them. And then we'd say, just say it's like.
00:28:18
Speaker
September 2021 that we've done this exercise. I would go into my camera uploads folder and delete all the old photos because they've all been organized into my digital photo hub. I've backed them up into three locations. One of them is actually going to be in Dropbox in organized folders.
00:28:35
Speaker
And then any new photos that come in that are taken from my phone, they're actually going to be in my camera upload section with new dates. And then I can monthly or quarterly or whatever it is, go into Dropbox and transfer them into my digital photo hub. And they'll be easy to identify because they're dated correctly.
00:28:56
Speaker
If you go to iCloud and extract your photos in some of the ways that, as I said, it's not easy to do, but some of the methods give you gibberish as names. So it's really, really handy. And I guess based on how prolific you are as a photographer, like doing it monthly to keep on top of it, if you're taking a lot of photos or maybe quarterly, if you're not that active.
00:29:17
Speaker
and just somehow diarizing that and remembering, scheduling it in as something to do. One of my dreams as part of being a photo organizer and the impact I want to make is that I think the problem is that we weren't taught any skills or any practices to stay on top of our photos.
Incorporating Photo Organization into Daily Routine
00:29:37
Speaker
It just kind of happened.
00:29:38
Speaker
So I'd really like every time that you pay your electricity bill, maybe that's quarterly or whatever it is, you do them at the same time. You take that time and you organize your photos. But also in preparation to that, I actually think it's really important to change photo behavior.
00:29:56
Speaker
Like I've actually started, you know, we all scroll on Facebook and Instagram at night or whatever, you know, social media platform we're on. I've recently started like interrupting myself and then scrolling on my camera roll and deleting photos, deleting the duds and curating my photo collection, just like I would just be on social media. So that's one of the photo behaviors. Great suggestions.
00:30:19
Speaker
Yeah, they're great suggestions. So you're either pairing it with an activity you're already doing on a regular basis and doing that curation or you're having a circuit breaker where you're like, no, I'm not going to zombie scroll on other people's photos. I'm going to use this time to get my own photos. Sort of. That's great. Yeah. I actually went through a stage two where I put like the screen time limit on my phone for Facebook because that used to be like my default, like get up.
00:30:46
Speaker
eat breakfast, scroll through Facebook. And before you know it, you can easily spend 20 minutes doing that. So I changed my screen time settings to five minutes on Facebook. So once I got to five minutes screen time set, enough of Facebook. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to use the rest of this time to sort through photos. And I used to actually, you know, just get rid of the clutter. So I think that's also another good habit to get into because you can take screenshots and
00:31:11
Speaker
all sorts of stuff that really feel like your camera roll that you don't need to keep. Yeah. And you might want to do when you're doing that, it might be as simple as you might not want to delete things, but maybe you want to start using the favorites button and just clicking favorites. And then over time you'll end up with a curated collection.
00:31:27
Speaker
But you've got to just start, like just start today. You know, like I'm just going to do it once and then you do it again. And suddenly before you know what has happened, like I've actually recently started pick this up from one of my colleagues in America. When I'm taking a photo of a recipe, for example, I'm now not doing it with the camera on my phone. I'm doing it in my notes app.
00:31:45
Speaker
And so I'm starting to separate, like I would just want to keep photos in my photo roll of photos of things that are important to me. And then my recipes are in my notes. I've put a label recipes and like, I felt a bit silly doing it the first time, but now I've got four, five, six recipes and all I have to do is search the label and there they are.
00:32:02
Speaker
and they're not cluttered in my camera roll. So that's been really handy and helpful to me. And you could make a folder for screenshots, for example, and put the screenshots away. Because what I found is, you know, I do this process for my clients where I'll, I do the whole digital, everything I've just spoken about with the digital reset. I do that for my clients. The wow factor is when I present their photos back, just say it's grandparents,
00:32:26
Speaker
And I show them the photos all taken from one particular month. And it's just the photos of the grandkids. I've removed the screenshots. I've removed the photos from the supermarket of what to buy. I've removed the bills. The photos of the QR codes that all of those...
00:32:46
Speaker
And they're shocked. They're like, oh my God, it's just the kids. Like, and it's like a relief, but you can do that yourself, you know, kind of every day, just putting them into folders or clearing the clutter. Here are my photos now. I've got, there's a QR code in there. There's a bill that I was uploading to cloud storage. There's like the label that shows the model information, product model information. So I could look up a manual for something.
00:33:12
Speaker
It's, yes, so many photos that I never want to, you know, aren't useful, don't want to see again. Our relationship with photos has changed. Like we, it's, it's funny. I, you know, I, I don't just work with digital photos. I work with printed photos and I help people organize all their printed photos.
00:33:27
Speaker
Now, because it doesn't cost anything to take photos like I did when we used film, we just take so many and the value of an image has just decreased. We're so overwhelmed by just imagery. We use imagery now to communicate. So, you know, what do you want me to buy from, you know, is it this brand or is it this brand? You don't write the brand name, you take a photo. So our whole relationship with photos of change is diluting the importance of the individual photo.
00:33:53
Speaker
So I really believe in changing behavior. I actually believe in adopting the same mindset as we did when we worked with film, you know, where each photo cost you money, each photo was precious. And back in the day, it was really expensive. So you stopped and you thought about it or you waited for the right moment and you took one photo.
00:34:14
Speaker
And that one photo is often like beautiful, as symbolism has meaning, it's just everything that you need. And so I really, like once I've gone through this whole process of organizing photos with other people, we just stop and they automatically say to me, I'm taking, you know, I've started taking less photos because why do I need so many photos? You know, and going back to those film days. It does, it makes you cherish them more. So one of the things I've started doing is
00:34:43
Speaker
because I've got my photos on my phone is every day I share a photo with someone. It's like a little habit I have now in the morning of you know how it has the recommended for you in the in the photos app and I there's always a photo of someone else either with you know my daughter or with a friend gives me so much joy and people just love it like little moments and it's much better to share a good photo than a terrible photo if that makes sense so having curated them
00:35:10
Speaker
makes a big difference. Yes. And that's why we take photos. We connect us with people. It brings us joy. Yeah.
Digitizing Physical Photos
00:35:18
Speaker
So Carly, you mentioned before that you help people scan hard copy photos so they can digitize them. If people want to do that at home, are there particular apps that make that a tolerable task? Because I can't think of anything worse than giving out a box of photos of
00:35:33
Speaker
scrolling out photo albums and thinking, oh my god, I got to scan every single one. Okay, firstly, if you're gonna scan your photos, I personally think, want to do it once and you want to do it well. They're scanning and they're scanning. I've spent the last 10 years in the scanning industry and you know there's so many things
00:35:51
Speaker
the factors that come into having a good scan can be the amount of resolution and therefore how big the file is and how much detail is captured. So a phone has a really small sensor like the size of nowadays they're probably bigger than my thumbnail but then you take a photo let's say you capture an image with a camera you know there's DSLR like there's a compact camera and then there's a DSLR camera and why do they get better because they've got bigger sensors
00:36:18
Speaker
which means they've got more surface area to capture images, more detail, more color, just everything about it just increases the quality. So yes, you can take photos on your phone and there are apps. PhotoMine is one app that people like to use.
00:36:34
Speaker
It's just got limitations because you're using the built-in camera to take photos. So out of all the different options of digitizing photos, it is the lowest quality to take photos of your phone. And strange formats of film, for example, won't necessarily capture those well. But then you can also buy like little machines.
00:36:52
Speaker
you know, that can scan negatives and slides. And again, I'm gonna say with scanners, you get what you pay for. So if you buy something cheap, you're not gonna necessarily get the best quality. Often the resolution is low, the quality isn't great. And by quality, it's like sharpness, color reproduction. Yeah, clarity of the photos. And also like you have to deal with dust. I scan photos professionally and I still have issues with my, you know, everything has to be clean.
00:37:21
Speaker
It's amazing and it's time consuming. So can you take your photos to people like you to do that scanning with a little machine or can you like
00:37:29
Speaker
Instead of having to buy one, can you borrow them from places? Like that feels like something, it's like a shredder. I don't know how often I'd use that. I think the only one I'd recommend buying yourself is one of the high speed photo scanners, which is like, it's like a document scanner. Again, there's one piece of dust, especially on dusty older prints, and it can end up on the scanner element. You end up getting lines.
00:37:52
Speaker
You know, straight across the scams. So it's fiddly and frustrating. There aren't many places that specialize in family photo scanning. We did at Michaels, but Michaels closed the lab a while ago. So I was really lucky. I've inherited all the scanners and I ran it for 10 years. So I'm doing it professionally.
00:38:11
Speaker
Something I am doing now for scanning, which is a little bit different to others. Cause now I'm a photo organizer. What I realized was in the lab at Michaels, people would give us a mess and we would give them a digital mess. That's a technical term. And so now with my photo organizing hat on, what I would do, you know, in my new business called Photo Genie.
00:38:30
Speaker
When we scan, we give you organized photos. So when I give files back, everything is dated. And I would encourage you, if you're going to scan it yourself, whatever it is, I'll come to people. I want to save people's photos, right? A printed photo is also just one copy of the backup. The best, you know, a print needs to be scanned so that becomes your second copy you put on the cloud. That's your third copy. Your photos are backed up.
00:38:54
Speaker
If people want to use their all-in-one printer scanner, I'll teach you how to get the best quality scan from that scanner. But what I would recommend is you take bunches of photos and you identify a date and a theme, and when you scan it, you include that date and the theme in the file name, for example.
00:39:15
Speaker
And then, you know, so what we'll do is we always have descriptive file names and also we, we redate the files so that the date of the file is not the date that it was actually scanned, but it was the date it was taken. So that way, again, you could take your, you could take those photos and load them into iCloud and it'll still come up properly, you know, in the timeline.
00:39:37
Speaker
That's where I realized there was a real hole, you know, in photo scanning and just not solving any issues if we're just digitizing, as I said, a physical mess into a digital mess.
Mia's Reflections on Photo Organization
00:39:49
Speaker
Well, currently your digital photo genie digi reset service sounds like a godsend for someone like Mia. I think that she's adding it to the Christmas list as we speak.
00:40:00
Speaker
Well, you know, no, I feel like you've given me some really good tips, like the tools you suggested I haven't actually heard of before. So I'm filled with confidence. I've got down here on my little 10 minute time. Actually this feels like more of an hour of power, but I'm going to get a photo sweep and get rid of the duplicates.
00:40:17
Speaker
And then I'm going to use another hour of power and get the big main folder machine going. That's pretty fun. And I'll start there. We'll see how we go. I feel confident now. Can I offer two more small tips that I just think are really important to get out there? Yeah, love tips. In 2017, I think it was, Apple started using instead of JPEG files, they used these HEIC files, which are high efficiency.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yes, they're annoying. And when they released it, they kind of did it overnight. We were working in the lab at Michaels and suddenly we have these new files that aren't compatible with the printers, you know, and they didn't talk to Epson and put in and give anyone drivers and anything like that. You know, it just drives me mad.
00:40:58
Speaker
If you think, sorry, it made me also think about when Apple started taking the USBs out of their computers, you know, so suddenly everything's going to USB-C or lightning, like, hello, all our photos are on USB cables, on USB devices. So what does that say about the digital dark age? But anyway, HEIC photos are not compatible with anything outside of Apple. So I always encourage people to switch your phones back
00:41:23
Speaker
to taking JPEGs. Oh, how do we do that? Okay. The way you do it. It's in the settings. I'm guessing it's in the settings. It's three taps. So you go to settings, you tap camera and then go to camera capture. And then you choose most compatible instead of high efficiency as one of the options. And that'll switch your phone to taking JPEGs again. Sorry, you lost me.
00:41:48
Speaker
Camera, I mean camera, which they preserve settings. No, camera capture. When you're in the camera part, then you go to camera capture, should be an option. Sometimes if there's been a new update, they might change it. Okay.
00:42:02
Speaker
I see it. So that'll switch your phone to taking JPEGs again. And then also live photos. Live photos are the little two or three second video. When you're looking at them in the Photos app on your phone, it looks like it's just a little video. But when you take those photos or when you take those files outside of iCloud,
00:42:24
Speaker
It's a photo and a little video. So it becomes really, really cluttered in your digital photo hub. And more often than not, those little three second videos are not really what you're going to want to be savoring. So some people like to use them creatively. Don't get me wrong. There's definitely uses for them and I'm here more and more.
00:42:43
Speaker
If you're not that way inclined, I would encourage you to turn the live photos off and it just moving forward. It's going to make your photos more manageable. If eventually you are going to start to take them out of iCloud and put them somewhere else as well. Cool. In my phone that the changing it from a HEIC to JPEG was under something called format. So I don't know what version phone I've got here. Oh, yes. And the live things under preserve setting. Yeah, just turn that off too.
00:43:11
Speaker
Amazing tips. Carly, this has been incredible. Thank you so much for sharing all your experience and ideas and tips with us today. It's such a pleasure. And I feel more determined than ever to get this fan. So where can our listeners find you if they want to hear more or even get your photo, Janey Digi Reset service?
00:43:31
Speaker
It's just simple, www.photogene.com.au. That's my website. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook. Yeah, there's a phone number there. So you're welcome to call me a love to chat about photos. And there's a couple of webinars and like bits and pieces online. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeagminlifehacks.com. And if you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend
00:44:00
Speaker
or review us in your podcasting app. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.