Know thyself and make good choices

07 Nov Know thyself and make good choices

For those of you who TOOK THE PLEDGE you might remember receiving Day 13’s tip.  “when you choose photo organizing software you need to consider your comfort level with technology, your operating system and your time and most importantly your lifestyle”

We love this advice so much we wanted to revisit it.

Make Good CHOICES

The Save Your Photos campaign spoke about this in the context of photo organising software but we want to take that back a few levels.

Why do we love the ‘make good choices’ advice?  We love it because since we first started The Filing Fairies we have always worked towards developing unique solutions to suit our individual clients’ needs, each client is unique with a different collection, different needs, different goals and different skills – there is no one size fits all solution.  That is why we spend time getting to know these unique combinations and we welcome you to contact us if you want us to discuss YOUR unique goals.

So if you are considering embarking on an organising project on your own we encourage you to be familiar with your own unique situation and needs.

Here are our top tips that will help you to ‘know thyself’ and to keep in mind the ‘end goal’

• What is your preferred way of consuming your photo collection?
  • Do you like to flick through images on a screen?
  • Do you like to read, feel and touch in an album or photo book?
  • Do you like the idea of watching slide shows on your digital TV?
• Do you really need to apply favourites, ratings or caption data to your files? Would you know how to search that if you did?

For example there is no point collating a comprehensively catalogued digital collection on a high tech app if you don’t use a computer often.

• If you are contemplating a DIY digital photo organising project or using organising software consider your comfort levels around technology and your computer files and folders
• Do you understand how to view and change views and read image file data?
• Can you easily search for and move files?
• Create folders etc etc

Remember you need to keep in mind the potential learning curve and financial investment (in training or equipment) that you could encounter. Or you may run into some tech challenges depending on the age of your hardware, operating system or the speed and connectivity of your internet depending on what software options you decide to use.

To re cap

• know how you prefer to consume your photos
• know your devices and operating systems
• know yourself and your skills
• be realistic and confident that you can maintain the method you choose