It’s hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. In my previous post I suggest a great idea to rediscover yourself by reviewing your past images to select a few that really stand out.

It’s a wonderful exercise to review your past work to see what you’ve done well and areas of opportunities for improvement. I suggest that you carve out some time for this project. It can be an hour a day or a block of time per week or even an intensive session where you go through it all in one sitting.

As an organizational and backup system I have a Dropbox Plus account which is $120 per year for 2 TB of cloud storage. It operates with the folders on your desktop like you’re accustomed to seeing and you can chose what folders are linked with your desktop so that you don’t overload your home system. Folders are easily accessible through a smart device app or any where you are that has internet access.

Within this Dropbox folder system I set up category folders such as Sunsets/Sunrises, Birds, Birds in Flight, etc. Consider it a master collection of all of your images that you’re going to gather and put into one place from all of your storage medium (external hard drives, usb drives, etc.)

Going through your storage medium, copy the image you want to transfer and paste it into the appropriate Dropbox folder. It’ll immediately begin uploading to the cloud service.

Once you have painstakingly going through all of your images (and I mean all of them) you’ll find a very nicely organized collection of images sorted by subject matter in an easily accessed back up system.

Phew ! Still with me ? This exercise took me eight hours straight through with the appropriate rest breaks.

Ok great, now you can go back into those folders and review “Where I’ve been.” You’ll see patterns emerge. It might be similar subject matter, how the images are composed, and the locations they were captured at.

With this personal insight you can begin filling in the gaps in your portfolio and focusing on more of what you love to do. Have some favorite spots you visit time and time again? That’s great! It’s also time to venture out and explore new destinations and subject matter.

I wish you all the best with this project. Feel free to send me a personal message if you have questions and even more important. Share your work!