organizing digital files and pictures

It has been a crazy couple of weeks around our house ... the kids have had so much going on with end of school activities that I've hardly had time to take a break. As the kids have been re-organizing their spaces and getting rid of papers and books that they will not be needing next year ... I have been looking at my digital pictures and noticing that I have fallen behind a bit on organizing and backing up my files.

I bought a new top of the line computer a couple of years ago that crashed after a few months and I lost all of my files ... so I learned the hard way that you have to back up your files (often) on an external drive. And I do that monthyly ... but what I also try to do is back up my digital pictures onto cds or dvds so that my

children will be able to have copies of our pictures when they are older. 

I put them into protective plastic cd cases and add fun cover "art" to them. You can see in the picture above some of our vacation cds from 2004 and 2005. I use scrap pieces of scrapbooking papers and a single photo for each cover. I embellish the cover with stickers, stamps and whatever else I can find that will not make the art cover too thick that it cannot slip into the case and close. I love to use my sewing machine on scrapbooking projects and I do that a lot with these cd covers too ... I guess that it is part of my style.

 

Whenever I make photo cds to give as gifts I add these custom covers to the cd cases as well. If I'm

making more than a couple of digital cds to give to a number of people, I find that it is easier to create a digital file and print it on a cd sticker ... it's a different look and but it saves a lot of time ... although I am not very good with getting the sticker centred onto the cd so I avoid making those most often.

I've made these cd covers for work when I was consulting as a creative director for fashion retailers. I worked on a lot of photo shoots and I always had piles of cds sitting around my office. Visually they looked nice on my desk and they were so easy to reference because I gave each cover a look that was similar to the client's brand. 

Well, gotta go and get caught up!