February Organzing Challenge - Photos!

I Heart Organizing's February Challenge is about photography.  This was a much needed challenge for me!  I really needed to come up with a system and I think I have a pretty good one now.

Here is what I do with my pictures.  I upload them every few days (or once a week) and I organize them like Jen @ I Heart Organizing does.  I "select all" the photos and then rename them the month and year.  Then I put all of them into the particular month folder (like 02 February 2011) and then I put that folder into the "2011 folder".

Here is how I rename the photos

Here is how I label the folders

My first back up is on Shutterfly.  I use Shutterfly to upload all of my pictures.  Pretty much every time I upload pictures to my computer, I immediately upload them to Shutterfly.  I make an album and label it with the year - 2011 and then the month or description such as 2011 April or 2011 Easter.  If I do this as soon as I upload to my computer it makes life so much easier.

Some of my Shutterfly folders

Also, I make a yearly family photo book every year with Shutterfly.  One of the reasons I do my Week in Review on my blog is so that I can easily turn that into a book at the end of the year.

Second back up - on CD.  This is something I have been very bad at, but I need to start doing it on the last day of the month so that I remember.  I have a lot of catch up work but now I will do it once a month.

 Third back up (is this a bit too much?) is my external hard drive.   It is a Seagate FreeAgent.  I back up all my files on it but not as much as I should so I am going to try to do that once a month too.

I have also just recently purchased this Advantus Cropper Hopper Photo Supply Case to put all of  my photos from years past.  I am also going to buy a prettier box to put all of my irregular sized photos in.

 This is my system and it does seem to be working well.  I have more work to do with backing up on CD's more and organizing more of my photos into my "Cropper Hopper".  The next big thing I need to tackle is getting my mini DVD's recorded onto regular DVD's.  One thing at a time though!