Organised Travel Photos

One of the joys of travel is seeing wonderful sights, taking photos galore and then enjoying them when you get back home. But how do you keep them organised, and how do you curate them from “galore” to “enough”? That’s what this organising lesson #4 from Morocco is all about, organised travel photos.

Thanks to Chantal Imbach from Photos in Order, I have a fabulous system for my photos. This system works for me. To get your own custom-built system, speak to Chantal. She knows all there is to know about organising digital photos.

The system goes like this. Before connecting to wi-fi, I audit the photos I’ve taken that day. Some are enhanced or edited, some are culled. Once my phone is connected to Wi-Fi, all the photos I’ve taken are automatically uploaded to a Camera Uploads folder in Dropbox. My husband does the same. From that folder I further cull any unwanted or duplicate photos and send the ones that remain to their current subfolder, also in Dropbox. The photos retain their date stamp so always stay in chronological order as they are filed.

In Morocco, that subfolder structure looked like 2023 – 05 Morocco – Day 1 – Arrive Casablanca. During our down time, like riding on the bus, we would cull, enhance, crop and edit the photos taken that day. We always did this before connecting to the Wi-Fi at our hotel, so that all the photos going to Camera Uploads were already curated. Once the day’s photos had uploaded, we would move them to the correct subfolder. Then, as requested by friends, I would create a daily Facebook post about our travels with our favourite photos, including a brief description. This served a dual purpose. Firstly, it kept my friends happy and informed about the trip, and secondly, it served as a travel diary for myself. Now, when I look at the photos I took, I can easily remember the story behind each.

I wrote briefly about my travel photo ritual after my trip to Venice, when it first began, but there was one difference this time. And that brings me to organising lesson #5 from Morocco. Don’t waste your time on terrible Wi-Fi. A couple of times, I spent literally an hour selecting the right photos for my daily post, uploading them, and writing a description. Then when I hit “Post” the awful wheel of never-ending doom spun around and around, and all my time was wasted when the upload failed. Ugh! My “daily” posts soon became “daily as long as the Wi-Fi is strong enough” posts. And the perfectionist in me had to be ok with that.

Unfortunately, now that I’m home again and no longer have the daily ritual of culling, editing, filing and sharing, my camera uploads quickly fall into disarray, with blurry shots, screenshots, photos of menus, etc. cluttering up the folder. It doesn’t happen by itself.

Which reminds me, I must go and add a weekly calendar reminder to sort and organise my photos.

Find more organising lessons from Morocco here.