Spring Cleaning: Photo Organization

Being the Type-A person that I am, I have a laundry list of spaces that I want to reorganize and clean, but who the heck has time for that?! I'll honestly be happy if I finish cleaning the house before we leave for Europe... and I've got 3 weeks to accomplish that mission.

Since we do have our trip coming up and I haven't learned how to resize any of my ginormous DSLR camera photos yet, I decided to start with the thousands of photos we have saved on our computer. Literally, there are thousands. Its amazing how much space these photos are eating up!

Does anyone else have photos from 2007 still on their computer? That's 7 years ago folks. Chew on that for a minute. It feels like eons ago, if you ask me.

On top of that, there were so many photos where I must have just kept snapping away. You know, like the ones of your dog that look almost identical, but you feel like you need to keep anyway? 

So my basic strategy to tackle this pain in the ass project was:

1. Don't delete anything on accident
2. Convert ridiculous folder names like "World's Largest Cocktail Party" to something along the lines of "2007 - Fall - College Football"
3. Back up photos in 2 places, because who knows where those disks might end up after our next move
4. Be cheap about it

Here is what I did to backup all of our photos before deleting them from our computer, which by the way is kind of scary. I triple-checked all of the photo disks to make sure the photos were there before hitting the delete button! Eek!

DVDs and Kraft Sleeves {Walmart}, Media Box

Delete, rename, and reorganize.
I liked the idea of renaming folders according to the year, season, and then a more specific description. The problem was we had photos from the same year and season in so many separate folders, it took forever to sort out. I also deleted a lot of photos in this step that were similar but unnecessary.

Back up to the cloud or your choice of online photo storage. 
I started looking into cloud storage, but there are so many options out there and everything seemed to be expensive once you bypass the free space limit. I ultimately decided on Picasa because as long as files are under a certain size, they don't count towards your total free space allowance.

Back up onto a disk.
I used DVD+R disks (I think you can also use DVD-R?) and it seemed to work well. You get more space on the blank DVDs than the CDs. Another option is to back up onto an external hard drive, but I had one of those die on me and I couldn't salvage anything from it, so I'm not a fan.

Label. 
This is really whatever works for you but I put the date in the top right corner and then more specifics on the left side. It got kind of wonky when it came to our iphone photos since this was the first backup in however long it has been.

Delete.
You can do it, it will be okay!

The downside to this virtual cleanup is that our house is still dusty... ugh. Now, if we could just fast forward to our trip so I can put some pretty Italy photos on our computer, that would be fabulous!

Does anyone else have tons of photos taking up space like I did? What is your system for backing up the photos?