What is the best way to digitise, store and organise your photos and videos?
Are you guilty of having piles of photo albums that you are unsure of what to do with? Video recordings that lay in a drawer that you know you need to organise but have no idea how to get started? Don’t feel guilty, you’re not alone!
Digitising them is the answer. But how do you digitise and organise your old photos and videos, and what do you do with them then?
Most advice found on the internet involves organising your images first. This could be by date, by person, by location. That is fine for storing images in traditional folders on your PC. ‘Family holiday 1973’ for example. But what if these images contained multiple people, or involved a wedding anniversary – what if each image could be uploaded once but then viewed in multiple places and not just a single folder?
You may not want to see images from one family holiday, but instead see every family shot from every family holiday you have ever had.
And then you want to share this with your family.
Or easily source the images to create a photo book as a gift.
Here we introduce the concept of a social archive. What this involves is not uploading your content into a standard flat file structure, but building your own digital archive.
YourArchive stores and secures your content in the cloud putting you in complete control of who can access it and how, unlike standard file sharing tools.
Once scanned and uploaded, images can be tagged with multiple tags. Tags are labels that you can add to content. There is the ability to create a master tag and sub-tags. And there are two separate classes of tagging; tags and people tags.
For example, an image you have uploaded from your family holiday in 1973 could be tagged with the following:
Family holiday, 1973, Family holiday 1973, Beach, Sunset, Family, Spain.
And the people tags; Mum, Dad, Bob and Sarah.
Whereas traditionally this image would have been put in one folder, with social archiving it has essentially been added to 11 (the number of tags assigned).
Uploading and tagging new images to an archive may be a continual process, and take time, as you continue to take more images - but the real fun starts when you can start to filter these images and relive the memories!
Let us introduce galleries.
Once your photos are tagged and uploaded you can create a gallery. This is where the value of previous tagging comes to light. Simply type in the tags for the content you want to find, for example, Family holiday, Family and Sunset. A gallery will be created with all the images that include your family, on holiday, with a sunset, ready for you to share with anyone you chose.
Another example might be creating a gallery with the people tag, Bob, and tag Birthday – here a gallery would then be created with all the images of Bob, that were also taken on a birthday.
Ultimately the same content can be selected, and filtered, depending the audience it is for. A gallery of all the images of Bob that were also taken on his birthday is of interest for the family, but not necessarily for work colleagues or other friends!
Galleries are published to a URL that you can then share with friends and family via email or social media. There is no need to send the individual images physically, saving time and email size limits! Commenting on the gallery is also possible, allowing your family to relive their treasured memories!
By digitising your old images and videos in this way there is no need to organise the images prior to sharing, this saves large amounts of time in scrawling through folders on your computer trying to find the relevant images you want to share and enjoy.
So start saving yesterday for tomorrow by loading your content into YourArchive ®