What I do with my own photos

As someone who works within the photography industry, I want to share some light on what I do with my own photos:

I purge and organize digital photos

Even though it may feel like digital storage is an endless treasure-trove of photos and space for more, it's crucial that I go through photos I take at regular intervals. I pick a fraction of the photos that I take to keep, purge the rest – and organize the photos by date, location and subject. I even tag the ones I want to print.

This purging and organizing serves three purposes:

1. I don't use up as much storage – it would get expensive to keep everything with the quantities of photos I take!

2. I have a more manageable collection of photos to look through and share with others.

3. It's easier to find the exact photo that I'm looking for.

4. I can with confidence print out my photos yearly, knowing I've only marked a manageable amount of favorites from the year (400-500 photos) as printables

I print small prints for my treasure boxes

I will print all my favorites of the year as 4x6s and organize them in envelopes inside a treasure box. I can fit photos and small mementos from two years into one box.

Personal Prints From June and July 2016

I make photo books of trips

Because I've been putting together books for clients as well as books filled with my client photos as keepsakes for myself, I got inspired to make a photo book for myself and my friend from our first girls' trip. We still need to get together to put together our trip book from this year.

A photobook I made of a trip to Mexico with a friend.

I put pictures up on the wall

We've got a few different spots with prints at home. What I like about the photo wall wire we DIYd for our living room is that we can easily switch out photos if we want to highlight something new.

I send them off to friends

When I've photographed friends, I try to make sure that they get some of the photos as tangible keepsakes.

While digital files are great for sharing and looking at your photos right now, printed photos will be there for you in the future – even when technology moves past the current digital file type or a crashing cloud system.