Organizing Your Info Post-Trip

You might not be like me, saving every relevant (and sometimes, not so much) brochure, newsletter and ticket stub from an adventure. I’ve been known to come home with extra pounds in my suitcase, and it has nothing to do with souvenirs or dirty laundry weighing more.

What do you then do with all of that stuff?

And then there are the photos. We may have up to five sources of photos between us on a trip – John’s phone, my phone, his point-and-shoot camera, mine of the same, and my big Rebel.

Know When You Get Home: If your phone service is like ours, your photos are saved to the cloud. Find out where and download them to your digital photo saving location. That way, if you lose that account access somehow (as I once did), you still have the pics.

Download your camera photos into the same folder into a subfolder labeled by the source (which camera) and if you can, another subfolder inside that by date. This is usually a setting in the download preferences. Where you find it depends on your software and hardware.

Paper gets to be cumbersome after a while. For years, I tried to put a trip’s memories into a binder. The extra benefit was the ability to show things to others, particularly when I printed a few key photos to put in sequence. BUT – this can be difficult to maintain for every trip if you’re a busy person.

The alternative: Your box of trip memorabilia looks like ours. Nuf’ said…