How to Organize Family Photos and Videos

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How are you organizing family photos and videos, readers? How are you keeping track of your favorite photos, how are you sharing them with friends and family, and how often do you see them?

I wrote a post a few years ago about my system, but I’ve changed it a bit since then, so I thought I’d share my tips and also ask for your systems, practices, and methods for organizing family photos!

(I’d particularly love to hear about what you’re doing with family videos, since I don’t have a good system for those!)

I should note at the outset that I’m using an iPhone and a PC, so if you have an Android or an all-Mac system, your experience might be different…

Psst: I’ve also shared my review of Nixplay WiFi digital photo frames, and we’ve discussed family photo projects, the best apps for privately sharing photos, how to get started with digital photo books, and how to use your iPhone photo album to organize thoughts. Ah yes, and here’s an easy trick to delete photos off your iPhone.

How I Organize Family Photos

I had a system a while ago that involved a lot of folders. Here’s what we do now:

• Upload everything to Dropbox.
• From there, save it to my PC’s hard drive in a folder labeled “2024.”
• MAYBE have a separate folder labeled “favorites,” but that’s an additional step that I don’t always get to.

(It’s an additional step because, as far as I know, there’s no way to copy your default “favorites” folder on your iPhone to your desktop in any easy way — instead I’ll put favorites into a created folder on my iPhone, because then you can go in and copy that created folder to your desktop.)

How I Keep Track of Favorite Family Photos

In my experience, the easiest way to keep track of favorites is on my iPhone itself — and when I actually want to do something with those favorites, like upload them to Shutterfly or Nixplay, then I can do it directly from my phone.

I consider my computer as a backup, and mentally, it helps me to clean my phone out because I know there’s another copy of everything on my computer. In previous years I had folders on the computer for every single month, but I’ve realized that just isn’t how I think about these things… If I’m looking for the cute photo of J. at the pool with H. then I just want to swing through all of the warm-weather photos at once — I don’t want to open and close a million folders trying to remember if it was May 2020 or September 2020.

I might make a folder for very discrete events, like a big vacation or someone’s wedding, but in general they all just go in a folder labeled with the year.

I’ve also been debating whether I should print photos also as a backup… I did just find this very functional photo storage box. I occasionally do print a few to frame or to send en masse to my in-laws and other family.

I do still create photo albums in my iPhone to organize various images, but those tend to be more like screenshots of recipes I want to make, or QR codes of returns for the next time I’m at a UPS store, and less for my family photos.

Family Photo Projects I Still Do

I haven’t done a photo book in a zillion years, in large part because I’ve realized I just never look through them, and can’t imagine a time when I’ll want to do that year by year. (Here were my tips on how to get started on photo books — we do still use our personal cookbook!)

But I do still create a yearly calendar with photos from the past year and give to family members — usually just from the same place we get our holiday cards, but Snapfish tends to be the most affordable option for this.

I also still upload photos to our Nixplay. We have two frames, and we’ve bought a few more for family members. (I’ve written before about how I use my Nixplay.) In the weeks before someone’s birthday I’ll have their playlist going, and it’s really nice because I feel like we just would not see a lot of the older photos otherwise. Setting it up was a lot of work, but only because I scoured all our old photos to put collections on it.

Something I’ve started doing recently is making a photo mug out of each family vacation — I’ll keep doing them because I can see them being nice keepsakes over the years.

We do still use our personal cookbook from the pre-parenting years, and I’m almost done making a second one for our “small kid” years. Funnily enough. there isn’t a ton of overlap — we occasionally make a recipe from our first few years together, but we’ve definitely been in a different recipe era in the toddler–little kid years. (And we’re hitting an era of new recipes as my boys are getting older!)

I don’t post a lot of family photos on social media, so we also still do photo holiday cards with pictures from the past year.

{related: the best apps for privately sharing photos}

How I’ve Tried to Organize Family Videos

I’ve totally failed in all of these attempts, so I’d love to hear what you do… In the beginning, I tried to make compilation videos representing all of the cuteness from a particular month. These were way too long (15–20 minutes!) and nowadays it’s really hard to look back and say, “Ah yes, I really want to see the video from my son’s second month.”

I’ve also tried to pull some of my favorite videos into an additional folder on my desktop… but I haven’t done that in years. We also tried for a while to rename videos once we uploaded them, to tag them with important facts about the contents of the video… but we never quite settled on a great system.

Instead, nowadays I find that the family videos I watch the most are the ones on my phone, in my favorites collection…

In general, I find it hard to imagine a time when I’ll want to watch a video of a birthday party or other presents-opening event unless it involved a really huge present, but we record them anyway because hey, something might happen during the event that makes it noteworthy.

For things like the school band concerts where we can never see my son in the back row, we just take audio recordings using the default “Voice Memos” app on the iPhone — and I like that you can edit the file name so you know what it is.

Stock photo via Pexels / Kampus Production.