5 Common Photo Storage Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

We love looking at family photos and reminiscing about all the fun we’ve had throughout the years. But, camera technology has changed a lot in the past few decades, and the way we take and store photos has also changed.

Do you make these common photo storage mistakes? Keep reading to learn more about storing family photos and how to save photos!

Mistake 1. Only Storing Them In One Place

Wondering how to save photos? Save them in several places. Not just one.

By saving your photos in just one place, such as your hard drive, you are risking losing them all. It only takes a little accident with a cup of coffee, and you could damage your laptop irreparably and be unable to get back years of treasured memories. 

Instead, we recommend saving your photos in several different places and backing them up so that the folders are always up-to-date. Google Drive is a great option and free! 

Mistake 2. Not Renaming Them

When you take photos on a camera or a phone, they are stored digitally and usually assigned really simple alpha-numeric codes as photo file names. But, these numeric names tell you nothing about the content of the picture, where or when it was taken, or how sentimentally important it is. 

Choose a simple naming scheme for all your photos, review them and name them. A simple scheme could be:

[Name, Place, Reason, Date] For example Emma and Jon, New York, Birthday Dinner, 2023.

Mistake 3. Not Selecting Them

Professional photographers do something called ‘selects’. This means they choose the best photos and delete the less flattering or well-taken ones. Even regular family photo albums should contain selects, rather than the entire phone or camera roll. 

Why? Because the value from photos comes from looking at them and remembering the good times, and no one wants to scroll through pictures of feet and blurring lights. Photos you don’t like also take up important space on your phone, camera, or computer. 

Mistake 4. Not Improving Them

There are a lot of ways to make a good picture even better. We’re not talking about photoshopping out your exes. We’re talking about improving lighting or the vividness of the color in your shots.

You can even digitize and restore old photos: check it out here.

By correcting redeye or damage on old photos and combining them with recent ones, you can make charming photo albums that tell a meaningful story to your younger family members about who they are and where they came from. 

Mistake 5. Not Valuing Them

Perhaps the biggest mistake that people make when storing family photos is that they don’t value them. So, they go on vacation, take some wonderful pictures, and then store them somewhere they’re not safe. That means they can be destroyed or stolen easily. 

One woman who wrote an article about it valued her photos a lot, but accidentally set wheels in motion to delete every photo she had taken since her early twenties, including some photos of her late husband. 

By backing up your photos using cloud-based storage or another photo backup strategy, you can ensure your memories remain safe for generations to come. 

Common Photo Storage Mistakes

Do you make any of these photo storage mistakes? Take some extra time to organize your photos, and you will be able to make the most of all the happy memories you and your family have amassed over the years.

We hope you enjoyed our article about photo storage mistakes. Stick around to read more interesting blogs.