Dealing with your legacy collection

One of the reasons that you might be here at this particular training right now is because you have lots of folders that look something like this. You have a year, if you are lucky, and you have a whole bunch of shots in there. And you don't really know what they are; you don't really know how to find what you are looking for, and you're probably wondering, what should I do with those legacy photos? Hear me out before you rush to judgment about what I am going to say. Here's my advice: for now, just leave them where they are.

Have you ever heard the phrase, today is the first day of the rest of your life? I know when I was a kid, that was a big deal; they made a lot of posters out of it. Well, getting organized is sort of like that. It's because what you have to do is develop your system first, and fine- tune it with enough works so that it makes sense, but not so work that you become overwhelmed, and I think this is what hurts people. They become so overwhelmed by the thousands of images they already have, trying to pull them into a system, that they become frozen with fear. They get buried under the stuff.

So what I recommend you do is follow the techniques that resonate with you that are in this training. Start today; start with the next card you upload with your new system, and fine-tune it, because you are going to make changes as you use it. Once you get to the point to where you feel like the system that you've developed is working well, then you can go back to those legacy images, and folder by folder bring them in to your new system.

And I have a confession to make: I have to deal with the same thing in that I am working my way backwards as I have time, and I have not completed this process. But what I can tell you is that since I became organized a few years ago, all of those images, I know exactly where they are, and they are backed up, and I am making progress on the older ones. So my advice is, start today with your new system, fine-tune it, and then as you have time, work on those legacy images.