Principles of home organisation you can apply to organising your photos

14 Jan Principles of home organisation you can apply to organising your photos

Many of you would’ve heard of or read the book ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up’ by Marie Kondo or are watching her series on Netflix.  We wrote about the book when we first read it way back in 2017. Some of you may have engaged the services of a Professional Organiser to get your home or office organised. There are many principles of home organising that can be applied when organising your photos.

Gather similar items together

Step one in organising printed and digital photos is to bring everything together in one place. For printed images, gather up all of your photo albums, boxes of prints, slides, negatives, etc. For digital collections: CD and DVDs, external hard drives, camera memory cards, USB flash drives, old computer hard drives, etc and then make an inventory.

Everything has a place

Just like physical items in your house, you should have a ‘home’ for your photos. When it comes to digital photos, we call this a Digital Photo Hub. Instead of your photos being saved across various devices, numerous cloud storage accounts, and different storage media (CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, etc), all of your digital images should be easy to find with the click of your mouse, in one easy to access location – with two complete backup copies of course!

Keep nothing that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful

The age of digital photography has many benefits; however one downside is we are now overwhelmed with the number of digital images we are taking and storing. We find it difficult to locate an image when required and are keeping so many images we don’t want or need to keep.

Thus, this mantra for decluttering your personal belongings can also be used when culling your digital photos.

Is it useful? Is it beautiful?

Do I really need five images of that sunset in Fiji in 2015 or will just one suffice?

Is the image of that meal I had out at a restaurant last week useful or beautiful?

Will future generations want to see images like this? No?

Then DELETE! Or better still, be intentional when taking photos and you won’t need to spend time deleting later on.

Create easy to maintain systems

There’s no use organising unless you’re going to maintain the structure you’ve put in place. Maintenance is key to keeping your photos in control and easily accessible – easy to complete weekly and monthly tasks is key to creating good habits. Sitting down on the first day of each month and going through the three principles above – gathering all of your photo taking devices together, moving them all into one place (your Digital Photo Hub) and deleting the images you don’t want to keep in your collection.

And of course, don’t forget the final step in photo organising – kind of like insurance for your personal belongings – create backups!

Have you implemented any Konmari practices in your home?