Making Sure You Never Lose Kindergarten Pictures Again
Okay so this is the last lesson in this module, and it's kind of the point of the whole class, honestly.
I've said Jackson's kindergarten pictures out loud probably three times now in this course. I'm going to say it one more time and then I'll let it go. I had a phone die on me years ago, no backup, nothing, and I lost every picture from that whole school year. Him standing by the door with the too-big backpack. Gone. I didn't even know I'd lost them until I went looking for one and there was just nothing there.
That's why I get a little intense about this stuff. It's not really about storage space. It's about the fact that a phone is a fragile little object that can die on a random Tuesday, and the pictures on it are not backed up just because you assume they are.
So this lesson is just: how do you actually make sure this never happens to you. Not in theory. Actually.
The three things that have to be true
By this point in class you should have most of this already, but let's check it as a list, because I think it's worth seeing all three in one place.
One. Backup is turned on. iCloud Photos or Google Photos, whichever you picked back in lesson one. Not "I turned it on once." Actually on, right now, today. Go check. Settings, then your name at the top, then Photos (iPhone), or the Google Photos app, then your profile picture, then Photos settings (Android). Confirm it says backup is on.
Two. It's actually finished uploading. We talked about the counter a few lessons back. If you've added a bunch of photos recently, or if your phone's been off wifi for a while, go check that the upload isn't sitting there stalled. I feel like people turn it on once and never look at it again, and then find out two years later it stalled out in week one.
Three. You're not about to run out of storage. We covered the two-dollar fee lesson for a reason. If your free storage is full, new photos stop backing up, and the app usually doesn't yell about it very loud. It just quietly stops. So check that too.
If all three of those are true, you are in genuinely good shape. That's the whole game.
Naming your folders so future-you can find anything
Here's the part that actually gets asked about the most, so let's do it properly.
Roberta from my ward asked me once how I'd sorted through all the Relief Society activity photos so fast, back when I was helping put together a slideshow. I ended up talking for twenty minutes straight about naming conventions, which, if you know me, tracks. She probably regretted asking.
But here's what I told her, and what I'll tell you. Don't name folders "Photos" or "2024" or "Misc." Name them with enough detail that you, six months from now, with zero memory of what you were thinking, can find the thing. So instead of "March," do "2024-03 Skylar Piano Recital." Instead of "Kids," do separate folders by kid, or by event, whichever way your brain actually thinks about your own life.
I do mine by month and by big event. Jackson's kindergarten stuff, if I'd had this system back then, would've been "2019-05 Jackson Kindergarten" and I would have found it in ten seconds instead of not at all.
You don't have to do this for everything. This is the organizing layer on top of the backup, and remember, backup comes first, always, organizing can wait. But once backup's solid, this naming thing is the next best thing you can do for future you.
The print thing, one more time
I'll say this again because I mean it. Print the ones that matter. Not all of them, that's not realistic and also expensive. But the big ones. The kindergarten picture. The temple photo, like the one Inez wanted from me and Travis that I couldn't find for way too long because it was buried under screenshots.
A phone battery swells and dies. A cloud account can get locked out if you forget a password bad enough. A print sitting in a frame on the wall doesn't need any of that to still be a picture of your kid on his first day of school.
I'm a little old fashioned about this one. I know it. I don't care.
One last plain thing
If there's one photo in your camera roll right now that you would be genuinely upset to lose, go check, today, that it's backed up somewhere besides your phone. Not organized. Not printed. Just backed up. That's the floor. Everything else in this whole course is extra credit on top of that floor.
Before next time: pick one important folder, name it properly using the format we just did, and text it to someone in your family so at least two people know it exists. That's it, that's the whole assignment.