How to Manage Your Travel Photos

For me, my travel photos are my souvenirs, my memories, and my visual reminder of good times in my life. I don’t tend to shop much when I’m away, I tend to take photos instead, and then use the money to print them out, maybe make a scrapbook etc. If I lost them without having backed them up somewhere, I’d be devastated.

Gone are the days when it all used to be about disposable cameras, and you snapped away during your break, only to get home and realise there was dust on the lens and all your photos were rubbish. Thankfully, there are lots of things we can do to make sure our photos are safe, backed up, and easily called upon at any time.

1. Auto upload your photos to Dropbox or another cloud provider

Storing your photos in mid-air, so to speak, means you don’t have to use memory space, and the amount you can save is huge.

I did actually lose my holiday snaps once, I took an SD card to Walgreens and they put the photos on CD for me, so I wiped the SD card but forgot to check all the photos had made it onto the CD. Bad move.

So that you don’t lose photos, have your computer set up so that when you connect your phone or an SD card to the computer, it auto uploads the files to the cloud.

2. Check out apps to improve your iPhone or smart phone photos

Even the most basic of photographers can enhance their snaps like a pro these days, with countless apps, such as Instagram as a basic example, to get rid of red-eye, change the focus, change the background etc. A good choice is the free Smug Mug app, which comes with some features that will help you improve the quality of the photos you take with your phone, meaning high quality, on the go snaps.

3. Learn how to crop

If you don’t want to mess with photo editing, you can at least learn how to crop photos, and get rid of that random person in the background, spoiling your landscape snap! If you’re on a Mac, then just use the built in “Preview” app. The key thing to know is that you use the rectangular selector to pick which parts of the photo you want to keep, before you hit the crop tool, so you don’t miss the bits you do want, and to avoid lots of messing about. There are lots of apps and programs you can use again here, and it’s often a case of just dragging, selecting, and pressing ‘crop’.

4. Print and display

Choose the best photos, the ones that you look at and instantly remember a moment that made you laugh or cry (in a good way, of course), and put them in a photo album, arrange them on the wall, or get creative and make a scrapbook of memories. I did this on my first trip to the USA, and I had such great fun putting it together, remembering my memories, and even now I look at it and am taken back in time.

5. Make use of SD cards

Like we mentioned before, SD cards are great for storing media and moving it from device to device, and these days they’re so cheap, you can use them as permanent storage – simply fill it up, store it, buy another, and repeat the process.

See, there’s no need to lose your photos!