As I work with people in Chaos to Keepsake I spend the first couple of weeks helping them ask the right questions of their spouse or IT person because many people don’t really know how to find their photos. It makes sense that people who aren’t techies sign up for my course. Why would they? But, there is something really interesting, and annoying, that I have learned about digital file storage and that is - the person or people who are in charge of digital photography and charting the course within both our homes and our industry are NOT the people who actually print photos. It’s true.
If the person in your home falls under - the person who’s in charge of backing up your photos but doesn’t care about ever printing them this is the question you need to ask.
Dear spouse or IT person,
I’m taking a photo course - can you provide me with a harddrive that includes all of our photos organized by date taken?
Signed,
If you did it right this won't take long
It’s after this point that, excuse my language, shit gets real!
Unless you have all of your photos on one harddrive that you can plug in and quickly access. You probably have a much lengthier conversation on your hands. You're not alone though this is figureoutable.
The four issues people usually run into are:
iCloud was set to optimize storage and therefore it takes a really long time to get access to them.
If your photos are in iphoto mac makes it tricky to access them. This is you fix it here.
You have many different types of photos - camera photos, iphone photos, old black berry photos, film scans, - and they are actually everywhere. The solution purchase one harddrive and start making copies.
Lastly, my favorite, you plug your harddrive in and realize you can’t see any of your photos? Why? It's probably because you haven’t formatted it in a long time and it’s no longer compatible. Again it's fixable.
If you're like my family and you AND your spouse would be lost trying to navigate this solution - you’re not alone and it's not hard to fix the problem once it's identified. Again, if you're like my family and you still dont' want to do it I can connect you to one of two great companies - one mac, one pc who work with this stuff all the time.
It’s for this reason that we spend the first two weeks finding your photos AND defining your story. In a lot of cases you might realize the mess of photos you have aren’t worth cleaning up - you may look at your list of events and think ‘hmm, I only need 40 images. I'm going to parachute in to find the photos and forget the rest.
On that note - I hope to see you in class on Monday.
To purchase the course follow this link - I would love to have you.
Warmly,
Emily