Enhance Your Photo Collection With Stories

25 May Enhance Your Photo Collection With Stories

We talk all the time about protecting your photos by backing them up but today we want to talk about the story that goes with your photos and how by getting and keeping your photos organised, you can inject some STORYTELLING into your photo collection.

Think about how often you share photos online. I am well aware that ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ but I’d wager that 99% of the time you also include a caption or witty hashtag to accompany your photos when you post them on Facebook, Instagram, Snap Chat etc.

Whilst you might be on top of your back ups and protecting your images, are you also protecting the stories that go along with them? Those comments, captions and even hashtags are an important part of your life story. Imagine looking back on a seemingly organised collection of photos filed nicely in year or month folders but in 10 or even just 5 years time will the photo alone be enough to remind you of the story that goes along with the image?

I don’t know about you but my memory is getting worse every day and I am constantly forgetting dates and faces! Look at the difference between these two screen shots of the same collection of photos

No fancy software required, just basic naming in a manually managed folder structure. Read more about manually managed folder structures here. Here are our top tips to protecting your stories as well as your images:

• Go the extra mile when organising your photos and add a meaningful file name. We recommend a When>Where>Who>What convention, you can read more about how we stay on top of our photo organising in our MOONWALK blogs
• Keep a journal that you can add short comments to each month when you do your back up (or even copy them from your social media). A simple word document will suffice or go old school and hand write using a fabulous pretty journal from one of our favourite stores like Kikki K or Typo
• Start an annual photo book and add a few pages of photos with their accompanying caption or story each month. I do this for my personal collection so that all the stories are fresh in my mind when I do it and then an annual photo book is ready to print at the beginning of each year. We also offer a monthly service like this to our clients if they prefer a ‘done for you’ service over DIY.

Does your photo collection have a voice?

Have a magical day

Mara