I love taking vacation photos – being in a different location, different climate, different time zone and capturing amazing views and memories is such a joy. I always make sure to have back up memory cards as well as batteries, so we are not scrambling with a dead camera. Couple that with the oodles of photos my kids take with their phones and you end up with an amazing collection!
This year, since we were going on a bit more of a guided vacation (a cruise with some touring) I decided to prep a little bit differently… I prepped for bringing photos home.
Set Up Your Files
First, I set up space on my home server for the upcoming avalanche of digital photos. I use a month_event naming structure for the folder and subfolders (sequence number_day date_event) for each day and tour stop. The outline of our trip looked like this:
Prep Your Photo Book
Next, I prepped the photo book I was going to be creating. This vacation was our second cruise on the same cruise line, so I wanted a book whose design mirrored the first one. I copied the same cover (which reminded me to get a similar boarding photo of the kids on cruise 2).
After the Vacation
When we returned I gathered up everyone’s devices and loaded them onto my server, dumping collections of photos by date into their corresponding folders. The phones provided distinct locations (which I found interesting) especially for days we were at sea.
Once everything was collected I was able to edit the photos down to the “best of” by having the full day’s photos all in one place. This then made it easy to load up my photos, by day, into my photobook software for placement.
It was nice to be able to show off a printed book of our June vacation at our July 4th family events. I was thrilled that it took even less time than before to get organized which made assembling a breeze. I will definitely follow that model again to “get ready” for vacation.
If you need help organizing and preserving your lifetime of photos, videos, and keepsakes, find a photo organizer near you at the Association of Personal Photo Organizers.
Karrie Converse-Jones is the owner of TurningLeaf Curation Services, a photo organizing and gift business where gathers her clients’ most cherished images and makes them easy to share because she believes our stories matter.
Another piece of advice: if you are traveling to a different time zone, reset your date / time setting on your camera so it will sync with photos taken on your phone (which typically resets automatically). We traveled to Iceland earlier this year, a 5 Hour time difference that made organizing a little more challenging and time consuming.
Good post. One of the things I do when traveling it keeping a track log using a smartphone app so that I can geotag my photos later at home. Here is a post I wrote on Keeping a log of your visited locations for later adding them to your photo’s metadata:
https://jmoliver.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/keeping-a-log-of-your-visited-locations-for-later-adding-them-to-your-photos-metadata/
If you are going to vacation always pack a camera and organize the files in better and systematic way so that there is no trouble which could be face in future, make separate folders for each trip as it is easy to remember too from where the pictures are captured or taken.
Now a day there are certain apps available for tagging your location as they will tag you according to your location when you click or take your pictures according to it and there will be no need to create a separate folder for pictures where you have click as it will mention in your each pictures well.
Some useful tips though to organize each and every moment of the journey, as photos are the main element of journey memories.