I've never really had a good system for organizing my photos, and lord knows I've tried over the years. My photography has changed over time as has technology and the where, how and why of sharing photos. This task has been looming before me in retirement. I hope to have many years of making memories and taking photos, but I had to corral the photo mess.

My previous "system" for the last oh.... I've lost count.... years, was to take photos on my iPhone and then periodically get the itch to start over, create a folder on Smugmug, dump all my photos there, wipe out my camera roll and start over again. I know this is a terrible system, but my brain could not handle having tens of thousands of photos in my camera roll (side eyeing some of my friends). It has taken me all week and hours and hours of work, but I think I finally have a good start.

For the curious everything is organized in folders by year with galleries for photos, videos and then big events or trips having their own gallery within that year folder. I also have some galleries for things that would live on my camera roll that needs to be saved like screenshots or memes (I love my memes). I even spruced up my photography website (www.laanba.com), set up a digital photo frame and came up with a plan for how I'm going to share photos online between my site, Instagram and Flickr. I finally have the workings of a photography workflow.

This is just the start because I have other places I have stashed photos, not to mention all the physical images from my past as well my mom's. And truthfully those year folders are a mess of duplicates and things that probably need to be deleted and whole trips that haven't even been processed. But it is a start and I'm happy to have some clarity and check off a big project on my to-do list.