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Organizing Baby Pictures

by Hsien-Hsien Lei on July 5th, 2005

One of the things no book or doctor will teach you after you have a baby is how to organize the baby photos. My husband and I bought a traditional photo album with magnetic pages just a few weeks before our son was born, but never removed the shrink wrap. By his third birthday next month, I estimate that we’ll have over 2000 almost 10,000 digital photos of our little darling that are fortunately organized and backed-up.

I don’t have a software program to organize my photos, so they’re in folders labeled by subject matter, such as one for my son and one for each trip. My son’s photos are further divided into sub-folders by month and year. I make back-ups of the pictures about once a month. One copy goes on recordable CD’s and another copy goes onto my external hard drive. Yahoo! Photos is the my third back-up although it isn’t a complete archive.

I also use Yahoo! Photos to share pictures with friends and family on a regular basis. (When my son was first born, I updated pictures weekly. Now I update every couple of months.) Choosing the ones that I think are the cutest and most entertaining to others, I prefer to add them all to one online photo album so that it’s possible to enjoy them all at one go via the slideshow. The online album now contains almost 300 photos and on slow days (ha!), we enjoy watching the slideshow of photos from his most recent toddler days to distant infant ones.

I find online photo albums to be the best way to share photos (other good services are Ofoto, Shutterfly, and Flickr). Using the album interface, a simple e-mail with one thumbnail size photo and link can be e-mailed to everyone. The recipients can then choose whether or not to go take a look. In my opinion, attaching more than one or two pictures to an e-mail is rude. Some friends have also sent me links to their Yahoo! Briefcase which isn’t suitable for displaying pictures; you have to click each photo separately and wait for a huge picture to download and resize.

When I take pictures of friends and their children, I download their photos into folders just for them. I usually dump both the good and bad ones onto recordable CDs and leave it to them to print out. For people who don’t use computers, like my mother-in-law, I print a batch of 50 or more pictures every few months via an online photo printing service and have the pictures mailed directly to them.

If you haven’t been organizing your photos up to now, it’s never too late to start. The sonner you begin, the easier it will be to use these pictures to embarrass your kids when they’re teenagers.

How do you organize your photos?

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