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Positively Midlife Podcast
Ellen and Tish, college friends now in their 50s, take on midlife with a big dose of reality, humor, and fun. They cover diverse topics including friendships, books, experiences, adventures, stories, sex, relationships & dating, health, wellness, and BIG dreams. Each week features fabulous stories, interesting guests, and open and honest discussions about topics that are important to women in midlife. Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen!
If you're interested in being a guest on the podcast or advertising, send an email to postivelymidlifepodcast@gmail.com.
Positively Midlife Podcast
Ep 97. Learn How to FINALLY Organize All Your Photos with Organizing Expert Miss Freddie
Have you ever stared at a mountain of digital and physical photos, feeling the weight of unorganized memories? You're not alone, and help has arrived with this episode of the Positively Midlife Podcast that Tish hosts solo this week. The special guest Casey Von Stein, better known as Miss Freddie, joins us to unravel the complexities of photo organization, providing insights and strategies that transform this overwhelming task into an achievable mission. She shares her personal shift from capturing to curating moments, emphasizing the legacy we create through organized photo collections for future generations.
Managing the ever-growing digital photo collection we've all amassed by midlife can seem like a herculean task, but it doesn't need to be! This episode guides you through the steps to consolidate your memories, from the initial gathering of photos to the joy of minimal maintenance with cloud storage solutions. Discover how the 'decide once method' can revolutionize your photo-taking habits, and learn to embrace tools that swiftly deal with duplicates and bring order to your digital chaos. And don't worry, we haven't forgotten those live photos – we discuss how to handle them with ease to keep your digital life clutter-free.
For both the creatives and sentimental hearts, we explore innovative ways to keep family memories alive. Tish divulges her secrets for crafting engaging monthly chat books that your children will adore, creating archival-quality yearbooks, and the magic of video albums, which turn your family's adventures into cinematic keepsakes. If you're ready to embark on your photo organization journey, you won't want to miss the details of the Backup Bootcamp course. Join listeners from coast to coast in this episode that's brimming with motivation and actionable advice to curate and safeguard your precious photo moments.
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Website: www.thepositivelymidlifepodcast.com
Email: postivelymidlifepod@gmail.com
Welcome back to the Positively Midlife Podcast. So I have a question for all of you out there how many times have you promised yourself that you are going to get all of your photos organized? You know, I've tried to make this attempt several times in my life. You know, I've gotten boxes out, organizers, all this, and then it just seems to go nowhere right. And I did have a great attempt on getting some of my Facebook photos bound into a book, and that was a great experience. But I have so much more that's out there, and so you know I wanted to.
Speaker 1:I wanted us to talk about this today. You know, I think the main thing that has stopped me personally is the time it would take, being just overwhelmed with the different choices of what to do and just not knowing the best way to kind of get started. So that's why I've invited our next guest today, casey Von Stein, and she goes by Miss Freddie and she is a professional photo organizer. So Miss Freddie is going to help us with all our what to do with our photos and videos, and she's also going to talk about some great apps that can start to help us get organized. I'm so excited today because we're going to be learning from one of the best photo organizers out there, so I want to welcome you today, casey. Do you want to go by Casey during this, or Miss Freddie?
Speaker 2:You can call me either one. My name is Casey, but most people online refer to me as Miss Freddie. I've been called Freddie since birth by my parents, so it's they're interchangeable to me, either one.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about yourself and you know how you got started into being a professional photo organizer.
Speaker 2:So my journey began as a photographer. I was a photographer in all sorts of realms wedding, pets, families and that's when I became Miss Freddie. When I was photographing young families little kids I wanted something easy for them to say, so I took my nickname Freddie and just made it Miss Freddie. And then, after 10 years of doing photography work, it was so obvious to me that people had no problem taking photos. They actually needed help doing something with the photos and backing the photos up and organizing the photos, and that was really their pain point, and so I started offering online courses. I started offering one-on-one services, and it was very obvious that that is what people wanted to learn from me instead of taking photos professionally. So I retired from photography back in 2019, and I've been doing photo organizing full-time since then. A lot of people don't know this is a career, so it's really rewarding. I love this work.
Speaker 1:So why is organizing our photos so important, especially as we start, you know, coming into midlife? This seems to be a much more nagging thing with me to get these organized for later, for my kids even.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think it becomes apparent later as you age. Oh my gosh, what, what am I handing down to my kids? And, as we, you know, maybe lose our parents or other important family members and we inherit the mess we suddenly have a different perspective on, like well, what does matter and what am I leaving to my kids? Um, why it's important is because it is such a source of stress. All the time People are stressed about are they going to lose their photos? Is their device going to fail?
Speaker 1:Do they have my Facebook going to be canceled and all my photos that I've taken and shared just poof going to be gone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, and so if you can get a system in place and tackle the project once and for all, the relief is so worth it. Just personally, that's worth it, not to mention the legacy components of leaving something valuable and meaningful behind for your kids. That doesn't feel so overwhelming.
Speaker 1:So I was so proud of myself when I did that book with all the pictures from Facebook and then I realized I have one book and four children. I thought, uh-oh, pictures from Facebook. And then I realized I have one book and four children. But but let's talk about what are some of the challenges that people face with organizing their photographs. Why is this so hard for us?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. I could name a long list of why this is hard. I think the most, the biggest reason, is a fear of making a mistake, because our memories matter so much to us. These are extremely valuable things, these photos on our devices, and we're so afraid that we're going to click a wrong button or we're going to plug something into the wrong place. Or we're going to click a wrong button, or we're going to plug something into the wrong place, or we're going to make the wrong decision and we're going to lose everything. And so I think fear is what overwhelms people the most. But I also think that it's just a lack of confidence, kind of in the same realm, a lack of confidence in what to do. We never received education in elementary school teaching us here's how you organize your photos, and the landscape has changed so much. Right, I grew up without digital photos.
Speaker 1:I grew up standing at the Walgreens one hour getting my film developed and getting the free doubles or the triples and all the things and so we didn't sometimes more than that and then sticking them in these books and when I look back at the old books, they're yellow.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, it's just kind of changed over time, yeah. So we, we kind of had a handle on things back then. Right, we had our process of printing. We were so much more aware of what we were doing. There was a cost associated with it. We had to be conscious about those 24 items on that roll of film. And now, once the digital age came around, it was like, well, that's her off. We had to be conscious about those 24 items on that roll of film and now, once the digital age came around, it was like, well, that's her off. We're taking pictures of every meal we eat, every outfit the kid wore when they were a week old. I mean, the volume, the volume has changed and we were never given the tools or the education on how to manage it. So I think there's definitely a lack of confidence.
Speaker 1:I'm even afraid to get rid of duplicates. I'm like, well, you know, I think this is the best pose, but I don't even and it's like it's not even rational Some of these fears that I have but it is so normal.
Speaker 2:It's like universal. People feel like they're the only ones that are carrying this, and it is not true. I work with thousands of people that all say the exact same things. None of us were given those tools.
Speaker 1:Well, let's start talking about some of the practical tips to organizing your photos. Like where would you start at? Like a hot mess. Like me, that my photos. I have old photos. I have photos from my grandmother. I have old photos. I have photos from my grandmother. I have photos of people that are so old. I wasn't born, it was. My grandmother was a child, when I don't even know who they are anymore, but I seem to be the keeper of the photos and I'm not doing it well, so where is someone?
Speaker 2:like me, and you described everybody's situation. We all have photos scattered in multiple places in multiple formats. My advice is to view each project separately. How can we make this smaller? And one way we can do that is to focus on digital photos first. So the boxes you've inherited and the things that are in your closet, we're going to set those aside for now and we're going to get our digital system in place, because the reality is our digital photos are more vulnerable. Those things have been sitting in the closet Okay For many years and every day hard drives fail, every day Phone, like you know. Phones get lost and so our digital items are more vulnerable. So if we can start there and get our digital system built, it will make it easier to tackle that closet later when we decide we want to digitize that.
Speaker 1:We'll know right where to put it right where it goes.
Speaker 2:So that's my first tip is get your digital house in order and then you can tackle other photo related projects, whether that's making books or scanning family history photos. Whatever the project is, it's easier once you've built your house, the foundation.
Speaker 1:What are some tools that can help us get our digital photos in order, like remove the duplicates and different ways to store? What kind of tools do we need to go to?
Speaker 2:Yes, so my process with every client and every student is to start by gathering all the photos into one place I call it a hub, and that's truly just a matter of often copying and pasting, plugging in the devices, downloading from the cloud service. None of it is hard work, but it does take time, and so the first thing that I tell people to do is just make a list of what those things are. Is it Google Photos? Is it iCloud? Is it Dropbox? Is it a whole old hard drive in your closet? Make a list of where the photos live, and then you can chip away at that list one by one by bringing them all to one place. I use an external hard drive as that collecting ground so that I have lots of space.
Speaker 1:Wow, I never thought of that. So you actually have people figure out where all their photos are digitally stored and then you're going to have them systematically go into a hard drive. That's a physical hard drive in your hand, so it's not like to another source, digital source.
Speaker 2:Got one plugged in right here.
Speaker 1:OK, so it's small. It's like a small, like what is that About? An eight by or four by four box or something yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, size of a wallet. The advantage of using an external hard drive is most of our computers these days are actually not big enough to handle our whole photo library. You know, computers are getting smaller and smaller. Price point doesn't seem to get smaller and smaller and it's expensive to upgrade to have a lot of space on our computers now, and so a hard external hard drive will run you about $100. And it's going to have a lot of space. So you know you can bring everything to it.
Speaker 2:And the big key I want to emphasize on this collection process, where we're gathering everything. So we're not even going to worry about duplicates, so you're not going to spend the mental energy thinking about Ooh, is this item on my phone the same as what I had in Dropbox or the same as what was on that old computer? You're just gathering a hundred percent of all the things, because once we get all of our photos in one place, that's when we can use technology to start cleaning up our mess. We can let it help us, but we got to get them all into one place first so we can really get our arms around the project.
Speaker 1:So when we were talking about doing this episode, I kind of looked on just my phone, and on my phone I have just shy of 30,000 photos and 2,700 videos, and I keep getting nasty grams that these are not backed up, that I needed to buy more iCloud storage and I feel like I'm gambling here, and so for a hundred dollars, I can have the peace of mind by being able to shift all of those over.
Speaker 2:Yes, and you don't have to remove them from your phone. Look at my phone. Mine has 24,763 photos.
Speaker 1:I see that yeah.
Speaker 2:There's nothing wrong with that number. People share their number with me, always with the same like shame or guilt behind it. There's nothing wrong with that number. Those are memories, blessings in your life that you've chosen to document, and it's great that you have 30,000 photos on your phone. It only feels overwhelming because you don't have a system right. You don't have the confidence that, like you know, they're backed up or you know what to do with them. It feels overwhelming right now because you're worried that they're that you're gambling, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I'm gambling for sure. So once we have downloaded all these digital photos from all our different stuff, what do you do then? What's the next step after that? You've gathered everybody.
Speaker 2:Yes, I've gathered everything and I've made a huge mess on that hard drive. The next thing I do is run duplicate finding software, so it will look at the whole mess we put on that hard drive. The next thing I do is run duplicate finding software, so it will look at the whole mess we put on that hard drive and evaluate where the overlap exists. And it is smart enough to be looking for visual matches, so it's looking at the photo itself to determine if they match. And it's smart enough to keep the best version with the most resolution. And it's automatic. You just click a button and it evaluates everything. And it's not scary because you get to review the results and confirm along the way before any changes are made.
Speaker 1:So this is it like an AI right? That's going to it like predates Technology. That's going to it like predates technology that's going to pick the best picture it predates that, but yes, it's. Ai.
Speaker 2:I've been using them for years. There's different ones for Mac and PC, but they're very affordable and so valuable to think to have to go one by one for all your photos just take forever.
Speaker 1:And are you finding they're pretty accurate in picking that best photo?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you are in control of the logic that it's using and so I tell it I want you to keep the best resolution or the earliest create date or the newest create date you can control all of that or if it's in an album or if it's been favorited, I want those to take priority. It's really, it's really cool software.
Speaker 1:Is it going to like determine?
Speaker 2:like, show the one, only the ones where I look skinny, you know.
Speaker 1:That's where AI is going to take us. I guess I'm asking for too much there.
Speaker 2:Okay, so then we've gotten rid of all of our duplicates. And what do we do next? So then I get it. I run it through a sorting program that gets it all chronologically, so that is no longer in folders that say like old iPhone one, uh, google download, you know. I get it all shuffled into one cohesive system that's just folders by year and month, and then it looks great, even though there's junk in there.
Speaker 2:We cleaned up nothing, we didn't delete the blurry pictures and the screenshots. It just feels so much better because now it's in a structure and then we can start making backup copies. Then we could put it in a cloud service where we maybe have some benefits like facial recognition and search. So getting that one copy of your entire photo library gives us the freedom to then take it places that are going to help us. Maybe we upload it into Google Photos and then it can name all the faces and it can find all the pictures we want just by searching the word dog. But doing that work, getting it all together, makes it so much more enjoyable when you get it into the service that you're going to use.
Speaker 1:And then, how often do we need to keep up with downloading into this device and running that software again? How often do you suggest that people do that?
Speaker 2:Once you build the system, you don't have to do too much maintenance. I download the most recent year once a year to my hard drive, so I just add 2023 to the hard drive and I don't really deal with duplicates too much now, because we're just using our phone to take pictures, so it's coming from one place, but I'm taking it from the phone and putting it on the hard drive.
Speaker 1:Okay, now you have this method called the decide once method, with photographs. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:What does that mean? So I apply that to when I'm out at an event, taking the pictures, like one picture is enough to remember the event. You can take absolutely. You can take more pictures, but when your son is blowing out the candles on the birthday cake, you don't need 25 pictures of that, you can just take one. So when we just take one picture, you're deciding once that's the picture, and then it makes everything easier down the road. Now, when I'm making a calendar at the end of the year or making a photo book or a photo gift, I only have the one picture. I already decided that's what I like and that's what I'm going to use. So, yeah, I call it one and done. That's hard for people more than others.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that would take a little getting used to, cause we're so like you know, the ones of us that grew up in where we took a camera with us and had to develop the film, that we take all these pictures because we want the perfect one and stuff. So you know, to kind of get more. You know specific, more intentional with. You, know what the photo is.
Speaker 2:But think of what that stems from. We couldn't see the pictures that we were taking on film, right, so we had to take extras to guarantee that it turned out the eyes weren't closed or something we can see right now that we got that picture of him blowing out the candles on the birthday cake so then we can stop.
Speaker 1:Now, I'm one of these people that sometimes some of my pictures are live photos and some are just photo photos and I don't know how I do that all the time. But do you have to handle those live photos? That kind of move it always reminds me of like a Harry Potter episode with the photographs and people are moving in the photographs. Do you handle those differently?
Speaker 2:I personally don't love live photos because what they are is a photo plus a low resolution video. That's what they are, and so to me, that feels like well, now I got double the stuff for every photo that I take. If I leave Apple, it now becomes a photo and a video, and I got to deal with that and I'm I'm I'm fine with just having the photos. That's how I've always been. We've always had just still photos. We've been okay. If I want video footage, I'm going to take a video. It's like a different to me. They're two different things. Some people love live photos and to them absolutely keep using it, but for me, I felt like it was going to be another decision. I was going to have to make more clutter that I'm going to have to deal with, and so I turned it off and I don't use live photos personally. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay. Now the other thing is um, so, once we get organized, kind of going back to that organization, um, how, how do you recommend that people get better at deleting the extra as they go along? Do you recommend that they kind of do that? Is it? Is that a daily, weekly? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm glad that you qualified that with once. We get everything into one place first, because I do think that's the priority, because then, once you have it in one place, then cleanup is more effective. You're cleaning up your actual collection rather than just this little bandaid of cleaning up part of my phone or cleaning up part of a cloud service. So, yeah, everything's organized. One great, then. I think cleanup can be the next stage.
Speaker 2:And one great habit I call the daily delete, where you make it smaller by just searching today's date in your library. So today you can type in March 28th and just see all the March 28th content all the way back to the beginning of your library, and you can clean that up one day at a time. So that might feel too big if. If you have a really large library, the smaller version of that would be like just review what happened today, delete those screenshots you just took that when you were at the grocery store or the thing that you texted to your kid. You can, you just need to get into a practice. Whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, you decide what works for you, but you need to get into a practice of review or else these things just kind of spiral way out of control.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely, yeah, okay, so let's start talking about kind of some of the best products. So, now that we have everything in a central location and we've done our deleting and we've kind of fine-tuned everything, and we've done our deleting and we've kind of fine-tuned everything, what are some of the best printing options? And you know the affordable ones, the, you know ones that are like keepsake quality.
Speaker 2:What does that look like? Great question. My favorite for ease and affordability is Chatbooks. It's an app that you download on your phone. You pick your favorite photos from your camera roll and very affordably get them into a book. And then, for the more keepsake quality or archival quality, the company that I like is called Printique. They are owned by Adorama. That's a professional camera company out of Brooklyn. They have the more archival quality printing. You're going to pay a little bit more and get a much fancier book that's going to last you a little longer. So I personally use both in my family.
Speaker 2:I use chat books to get monthly books. I pick my 30 favorites. They come immediately. They come immediately, they cost $7 and my kids can do whatever they want with them Look at them real quick, get the photos in their hands and then once a year I make what I call a family yearbook where I took my favorite 300 photos or so from the year and I put them in an archival quality. One of those. That's what I would keep on the shelf and that's what I want to carry long-term. One of those.
Speaker 1:That's what I would keep on the shelf and that's what I want to carry long term. Oh, that's. That's kind of like a nice Christmas gift to the family. Now, if you have multiple children, do you recommend multiple copies, is it? It does it get more affordable, or is buying two copies or three copies just as expensive?
Speaker 2:I made the decision that I was only going to make one copy because I just I didn't want to house that many books and make that big of an investment without really knowing what my kids' preferences are going to be when they leave the house. My kids are 11 and nine and they enjoy these books right now. I don't know that they're going to want a whole bookshelf of them by the time they're 18 to take with them. If that that time they do, I can absolutely print additional copies, or they can take my copies, maybe, but I didn't want to commit to buying three copies of every book forever, so I did not purchase copies for my kids gotcha, I guess.
Speaker 1:I guess it can rotate me um now. You also do video albums. Talk about that and I don't think I've utilized that. You know, like videos, like I'll take them, we'll look at them, but I never thought of a video album. So how does that work?
Speaker 2:yes, this started four or five years ago. For me, I thought it would be fun to make a video after a family trip. So during the trip I was shooting video footage and when we got home I set it to music and I made like a five minute recap video and my kids loved it. So they ask every single trip, can you make a video? And so I started that practice. First I had these videos and I was thinking how can I get this in a format my kids could enjoy? My kids don't have phones yet or devices, so I found what I call a video book or devices. So I found what is I call a video book. You can buy them through my website, but it's basically a little screen but that's all it does is play the video. So it's like a flash drive where I loaded the videos on it and then my kids can open it and hit, play and just watch those. But they love that book. They show it to all their little friends.
Speaker 1:The babysitter who comes over they play these videos for them, and so it's really fun to watch them enjoy it rather than just being hidden on so and just so our listeners know, we're going to have the links for all this stuff, how to get to your products and everything you know, so you'll be able to to find that. But those video albums, so they're just like other albums, they're individual. For an individual video, right, is there special? I put putting I put several.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I put several videos on it, so I have maybe 10 videos like a playlist that they then watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, oh, there's actual playlists. I like that too, so it's not like you have to have like 10 different uh, these video, yeah something I started buying one a year.
Speaker 2:Just there's the family yearbook and then there's the video book, and if I could do it differently now that many years have passed, I would just make like family videos volume one, load it till it was full, because now I have a lot of these books laying around and my kids still enjoy them, so it's fine. But I would probably do it at a little larger scale, not so strict, once per year.
Speaker 1:I love that and sometimes, like you know, again, I think this is a change that I'm going to make. Going forward is to take more video and less pictures. So it just takes a single video to kind of get the whole gist of a, an event, you know, and it's more interactive, but I guess it's it's been that I didn't know quite how to share it or you know how to view it. But to have a book, like an actual physical thing where you can load it into, I love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first step is making the keepsake video. I guess you could call it right, cause they're not just clips from my iPhone that my kids are watching. I, you know, set it to music and I clipped it down to be the to like, fit the music, like it's kind of a piece of art. I love it, I love it. I do have a course teaching how to make those custom videos. If that is something that interests you and you don't have to put them on a book, you can put them on YouTube, you can put it on Facebook, you can do whatever you want with those custom videos, but I do love having the books for my kids.
Speaker 1:You have even just a separate course. That really just specific to how to do that.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yep, oh, I love that. Is that something that somebody could gift to someone else?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, all of my courses are available, yep, any courses available as a gift certificate or the book. The video book itself could be gifted. My favorite one that I did was I've got two favorites. One was for grandma's 90th birthday. They recorded videos of all the grandkids saying happy birthday, grandma, and sharing a memory that they loved of her, and then, at 90 years old, she got the book not super tech savvy All she had to do was open it and then watch all of her grandkids talking to her. That one was great. And then I did a similar one for Father's Day, where he didn't know. The mom filmed videos of the kids doing similar messages and I thought that was cute. So, yes, they are great gifts, no matter the tech level. My kids can use these as toddlers, or grandma and her 90th birthday can use it. They don't require any tech savvy.
Speaker 1:To view, it To put it together.
Speaker 2:It's just a play button.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, I love that. All right, um, so now that we have all of our digital stuff organized, we we know how we're going to be printing it out or making books and all that stuff. Now we have that closet that we were talking about, where we have the boxes of the old photos.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought we were just going to ignore the closet keep the door closed.
Speaker 2:Yes, that is its own project. Yes, but it's actually can be really fun work, just as organizing your digital photos can be fun work because you're unearthing old memories you haven't seen in a long time. That box in the closet has some hidden gems in there too. So my advice is the same when you tackle a physical or physical photo project, and that is to try to make it smaller. So instead of viewing the whole closet, say, well, this month I'm tackling this box or how can you make it smaller, just to make it feel achievable. And then my advice is to kind of sort into really high-level categories as you're tackling a box.
Speaker 2:At first I have a pile that's trash Like this is a photo of a tree. I don't know any backstory on the tree, there's no people in the photo, there's no notes. I don't need to keep the photo of the tree. The doubles and the triples we got for free when we developed those can go in the trash pile. So the first pass through a box I'm really just looking for what doesn't even matter, what can I throw away, and often that's most of the box. But you're left with a stack Like these matter to me and that with those I move on to digitizing so you can hire somebody to scan your photos.
Speaker 2:I offer those services. You could buy a scanner to do it yourself at home. I have a course that teaches you how to do it. But then, when you're digitizing them, you add them right into your hub with all of your digital stuff that you organized, and once they're in there, they get the same tech benefits. So the facial recognition will identify the faces on those scans. You can search, like I said earlier, for the word dog, and it works just on those scans, like it did with your digital photos. And so that's when it gets really fun. You get all of these pictures from your childhood and your family into this and you can make videos, you can make books, you can share things with family easier. When they're in a box in your closet, not much you can do with it, but once you get them digital, you can really do a lot. It's really fun once you get there.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that and I like how, again, you have another course that kind of helps with just really that specific thing of how to once you have them gathered they have to have them gathered, and then you're going to teach how to scan and and what you can do with those scan photos.
Speaker 2:Yes, yep, the technical stuff, like if you want to change dates and you want to rename them, and the settings to use on the scanner, all that. Yeah, my courses are all like separate projects, because the back to the thing I said at the beginning is you have to focus on one thing at a time or you're never going to to finish this project. So I have a course that tackles the digital organizing where I think you should start. That's called backup bootcamp. That's my most popular course. But then if you decide you want to make photo books, there's a course on that. If you want to make custom videos, like we talked about, there's a course on that. If you want to scan, there's a course on that. So, one at a time, break the project down.
Speaker 1:I like that. Now you know again, following you on social media, you had talked one time about Apple, the Apple journal app and how we can use that with our photos, and I bet a lot of people don't even know that there's an apple journal app it's brand new.
Speaker 2:It's brand new. It just came out december, january. It just came out a few months ago and, uh, it's pretty neat. It has prompts in there because it, you know, has access on your phone to see when you took a lot of photos when you did a workout, and it will prompt you Like, would you like to journal about this hike that you did at XYZ location? And you can add in photos. You can add journaling. The nice thing is Apple's really big on privacy, so all of this is encrypted and it's not accessible to other people. It's all on your device, for your eyes only, and so it's. That's great. Apple's big on privacy. It's just in its first iteration, so I hope it will continue to improve. But yeah, they just launched it. It's free, it's on your iPhone automatically and you can play around with it.
Speaker 1:You know, as we're talking and stuff like that, you know it doesn't seem so daunting. You know the way you're describing, you know breaking it out, doing different parts of this that allow us to put it all together. It really isn't. But you know, I don't think people realize there is a real psychological benefit to organizing your photographs. Yeah, what have you seen when you work with clients? What do you see as the impact?
Speaker 2:Oh, the weight relief off the shoulders of lifting this burden of I'm always afraid I'm going to lose my photos or I don't know what to do with them, always afraid I'm going to lose my photos or I don't know what to do with them. That is such a psychological gift because then photos become fun again. Like you can do all these fun things we're talking about feels like you can't do it when you're just worried about having 30,000 on your phone and not knowing what to do with them. So the that is a really big emotional component.
Speaker 2:I've also heard from a lot of clients saying like I watched my girls looking at our Google Hub or our Apple TV and they were seeing all these memories from their childhood that they had never seen before. And so it's watching your family enjoy the memories that legacy component is really such a gift too. So it all starts with just getting those digital photos organized and it is a lot of work. I mean I know this sounds like really fun and uplifting and easy and conversation. It's going to take time, but that work is so worth it because then you get to do the fun stuff.
Speaker 1:So what type of time commitment are we talking about when we start to, you know, download and organize um? What type, what type of time commitment should someone really expect?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it varies dramatically. So my backup bootcamp course is the one that gets your digital photos organized and backed up. Um, it's wildly different for everyone because it depends on your computer speed, your internet speed, your tech savviness, the number of photos you have. But the average student takes about a month to do the project. Now, that's not actively working for a month. There's so much waiting. You run the duplicate finder. It runs overnight. You come check it the next day or you download a batch from the website. You come back check it in a couple hours.
Speaker 1:But start to finish. I would set aside about a month of just working on it little by little. Now, your bootcamp, is that like a one day thing, or is that like you go several times during like that month process?
Speaker 2:It's a self paced course. So as soon as you buy it you have access to all the lessons and you move at your own pace. So the nice thing about following a course is there's lessons broken out so you can say, oh, life's getting busy, I'm on this lesson, I'm going to come back to it in two months and then pick up from where you left off. And then also you get access to future updates. So the reality is tech is constantly changing and I have to go into that course and update. Here's what the duplicate finder looks like now and here's what this cloud service looks like now. So it's I call it a choose your own adventure. There's a path for pc users, a path for mac users and you get to pick from different popular cloud services and kind of make your choice and then follow through boot camp with those choices.
Speaker 1:I would think to get like a buddy that was going through it at the same time, to kind of keep you back and forth. Where are you today? Where? Because I could see like you could easily like keep putting it on the back burner and this is really meant to get you through this, not taking over your lifetime you know time commitment, but a let's do a little bit at a time to get you there.
Speaker 2:I love that. That's huge. And I've had people use me as that accountability partner. I have one-on-one consults and they'll book one a month and then I give them homework. By next consult you got to, you have to have finished this, you know. So I've had people use me or pay me to be that accountability partner. I love it If it's one of your friends and maybe you guys get together and work on it a little bit together and then you have homework and it can make it more fun to have it be more social, for sure.
Speaker 1:I think by using you, you could highlight very early on like, hey, this is, maybe this could make it go easier. You know, you can kind of, you know, coach through. It's Just like going to the gym If you don't know how to use the equipment.
Speaker 2:It's not going to be as effective I like that, yes, I do offer something called a support group. Cause you can't really find information about it on my website, cause I only invite people who are in the core students to come and do it, but twice a year.
Speaker 2:I do a support group and it's a group of like 10 of us on zoom. We meet once a week for six weeks and we all work through it to get there and I screen share with everyone individually so I can check on their work and give them personalized suggestions. Like you said, maybe you should do this differently. It's it's pretty hands-on, but sometimes that's what it takes to get across the finish line. Sometimes a self-paced course just doesn't work for everybody. They need a little more pushing across the finish line.
Speaker 1:You have self-paced courses, you have these type of courses, you have boot camps, support groups, one-on-one sessions. I mean you really offer a lot of different opportunities. You know, I love the video class that you offer, just the digital organizing the backup boot camp, the support groups and again, with the support groups, you have to be actively going through your other courses to be part of that, which makes complete sense because you bring someone from the outside and it would be chaos because they don't know where.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they need to have the videos to reference what we're learning together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what type of cost are they looking at? Just to get started.
Speaker 2:Bootcamp is $99. It is a one-time cost, not a subscription, and you get access to the future updates, like I said, and then all the other courses are less than that. So I call them fast classes. The video one is a fast class. That means it's just one video and it's $15. So I tried to keep my things very affordable so that when you feel inspired to work on one of these projects, you can jump right in and do it when you're feeling motivated, because the motivation is the key.
Speaker 1:What was one of your biggest success stories with helping to organize somebody.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, my biggest one, memorable to you.
Speaker 1:You don't have to be named or anything. No, I would never name names.
Speaker 2:but I had somebody who had 4.7 million files when we started because she had made all these backup copies and she didn't trust any of them. So she had 10 hard drives all with portions of different things on them and I so I started with 4.7 million files and I got her down to about 300,000. That's her finished library. She takes lots of pictures. She had a big library but it wasn't 4.7 million.
Speaker 1:That was a big project. That one took a year. Okay, so if you can get someone like that organized, you can deal with the regulators of us.
Speaker 2:That puts your 30,000 in perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if it makes you feel better.
Speaker 2:my average students have 30 to 40,000 on their phone, so that's a very normal number that you have.
Speaker 1:So what is your best piece of advice to someone in midlife when it comes to organizing their photos?
Speaker 2:Just start. You have to just start, pick the one project. Like I said, my advice is to start with digital organizing and just start chip away at it, cause once the digital stuff's in order, you can move on to physical, you can move on to making books, you can move on to making videos, whatever you want to do with it. I worked on a really fun legacy project for my mother-in-law years ago where she had a whole room in her house that's full of scrapbooks and pictures and loose photos. And she turned to me. She has three boys and she said I don't think they're going to want any of this, I don't know what to do with it. And we worked on it over a couple of years. We scanned everything in and I turned it into eight books.
Speaker 2:They're chapters of her life. So it's like her childhood, her marriage, her three kids each get a book. The second marriage and then she had two really, really transformational trips in her life a trip around the world when she graduated high school and a trip around the U? S when she was nine and her parents took her to school. So they had she had me make dedicated books for those two trips. So these eight albums sit in her living room, shows them to everybody, and I know she's getting a ton of enjoyment out of them already. But I know when she is no longer with us it's a lot easier for us to keep those eight books than it is to keep that whole room that was full of all the scrapbooks we started. So start one step at a time, but that could be your end picture of you have just a much manageable, more meaningful thing to hand down to your kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay, we ask all of our guests this question what is your superpower?
Speaker 2:My about page on miss freddiecom says photo organizing is my superpower. So that, as may be obvious from today's conversation, but I'd say on one level further, being decisive about what to keep and throw away, I think is a superpower because I've learned that people aren't good at that. That's why we have 30,000 on our phone. It's because we can't decide between things, and my years as a photographer really honed that skill and so I am very decisive, which makes it easier to get my books done.
Speaker 2:I make the decisions. I adhere to that done is better than perfect philosophy. And I get my's done. I make the decisions. I adhere to that done is better than perfect philosophy. And I get. I get my stuff done.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This has really been enlightening and definitely inspiring and I hope our listeners reach out to you to start some of these courses. It's important and it will really put that peace of mind that we were talking about. But before we go, I also wanted to do a big shout out to some of our newest listeners in Danbury, connecticut, sheboygan, wisconsin, lake Zurich, illinois and Yucca Valley, california. I love that new people are always kind of joining the podcast.
Speaker 1:Definitely share this with a friend, share this episode in particular, with some friends and, you know, start to do this together as like a group and, you know, take some of these courses and stuff like that. You know what a gift to each other. And again, I think some of these courses for for friends and stuff what a great gift that would be. So, thank you so, so much. You can always find us on the positively midlife podcastcom, so sign up for our newsletters. We're going to be starting some newsletters soon and you can see all of our obsessions and blogs and stuff that we're making there. But thank you so much, ms Freddie. I think this is really going to inspire a lot of people to get started. Thank you for everything.
