How to Save and Organize Pictures and Videos from Your Phone

We are now in a time when people use the camera on their phones and save pictures and videos on their computers.  Getting pictures printed is much more rare so most of your storage might be taken up by your photos.  But what happens if your phone is lost or stolen?  All those memories are gone.  Today I want to share with you an easy way to save and organize your pictures and videos.

Step 1: Download pictures and videos from your phone to your computer by plugging it in and selecting the items you want.  

Step 2:  Save them to a picture folder.  I've found the easiest way to organize things is by date.  Make a folder for the year.  Within that folder, make more for each month.  I name mine like this : 01 January 2016, 02 February 2016...  That way, they will all be in the correct order.  I also make a separate folder with years and dates for videos so they are in their own folder.

Year Folders.

Step 3: Once you've created all your folders, place the pictures into the month where they belong.  This can be tricky if you're organizing pictures from a while ago and can't remember the dates.  Sometimes if you hover over the picture, "date taken" will pop up.  You can also right click the picture and select "Properties" and the date might be displayed there, but sometimes, this isn't reliable.  You might have to guess on certain images.

Month Folders.

Step 4: If you want to get even more organized, you can make event folders within the month folders.  For example, if you attended a wedding in October, you would make a folder that says "Wedding" inside the October folder.

On the top left you can see a wedding event folder.

Step 5: Once you have all your pictures organized the way you like, you'll need to save them to an external hard drive.  You can price them here on Amazon, or visit Best Buy or other electronics stores.  This is definitely worth the investment because you'll be saving all your memories.  That way, if something happens to your computer, you have a back up.  I usually delete the previous year folders and only keep the current year on my computer to save space.  Then, when I want to look back on past years, I just plug in my external hard drive and can easily go to whatever time I want to see.  I have a Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive for about $80.  It can store 1TB of information, which is a lot!

Step 6: Now that you've saved everything, it's time to delete the things you don't need off your phone.  You'll be making room for future pictures, videos, music, and apps.

This is a great way to ensure your precious memories are safe, make them convenient to access, and free up storage on your phone.  Once you get a system going, you can do this every few weeks and it won't take long at all.  Don't hesitate because you never know when something might happen to your devices!