A few weeks ago, because I had a great coupon code, I made Ryan’s senior album. I wanted to add pages with pictures of him growing up, first days of school, sports, etc. I had many photos in mind that I wanted to use. I had always planned on organizing my old photos someday when I had time. Note to parents of young children: Someday comes too fast.
So, as I frantically looked through CD’s and DVD’s from 1999-2006, not finding the pictures that I wanted, I decided that the time was now. I asked my husband for another external hard drive and started the process.
When I really got into photography, about 10 years ago, I started automatically saving my files with yost_date_serial number and saved them in folders by year with subfolders for months or events. I have a backup drive also. Eventually, I even added keywords. But when I first started, everything was brought in and saved as P(followed by 8 numbers) and. I guess, I thought I’d remember everything else about the photo. On some, I was able to go back in to the metadata and find the date that I took it, but some of the metadata was stripped (and who has time to go through that for thousands of photos!). On top of that, I hurriedly saved things on DVD’s with many repeated photos and folders, many without a name on the front!
CD’s and DVD’s don’t last forever and now are not a common way to store photos. I had some, not many, that had corrupted files. With any technology, we need to do whatever we can to save our memories. For the last two weeks, I’ve been doing one disc a night, renaming and putting into folders, like my current way.
After talking with other Moms recently though, I found out that many are using Facebook as their storage! Yikes! So this is my note to young Moms.