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How to upload, organize, and share family photos

4 min read

Jan 1, 2025

Collect your photos into the cloud

Uploading your photos to a cloud storage service like Dropbox is a first step to making sure family memories are kept safe, accessible, and shareable.

Using a mobile device, someone takes a photo of a family standing around a child and their birthday cake.
An illustration of three people leaning over a plan in an office is shared with six team members using a Dropbox file request.

Organize your photos like a pro

Now that you have all of your family photos in one place, you can make them easier to find later with the right filing and naming system.

 

Delete accidental or duplicate photos

Dozens of accidental iPhone screen capture images aren't very interesting to look at and take up a lot of cloud storage space. If you use automatic camera uploads, you will inevitably upload a lot of unneeded photos. Thumbnail previews are a great way to find and delete the photos you don't want quickly.

 

Put into folders

Instead of renaming, you can organize your photo library into folders. The most efficient folder naming convention, used by everyday people and professional photographers alike, is to first break it down by date, with folders for each year. Within those, you can create a subfolder for each month. Then create a subfolder for a specific event, trip, or occasion. For example:

My Photos  /  2025 /  January 2025  /  Coulson Family Reunion

If you don't take many photos or are uploading old photo scans, you might want to only have subfolders for events, like "Jack's baby years," instead of a bunch of empty month folders.

If you use camera uploads, Dropbox will automatically change your photo names to the date you took them, i.e., "IMG_1801.jpg" to "2024-04-26 15.30.42.jpg."

Using this naming convention as a base, you can select a batch of photos from one day and put them into a folder, like "2024-04-26 Hiking When I Should Be Doing Work."

If you have a lot of pictures, you can nest them in year and month folders, like "Photos / 2024 / 2024-04 / 2024-04-26 Hiking When I Should Be Doing Work."

 

Rename (if necessary)

Renaming is time-consuming and often unnecessary. Before renaming, we first recommend organizing your photos into folders.

If you must rename some images, a reliable format for filenames would be to include the place or event where you took the picture and its date, "Paris_Oct 2022_01.jpg," for example.

You could be even more specific, like "Paris_Oct 2022_Eiffel Tower Tour_01.jpg," or include keywords that can act as identifiers.

Share photos with easy access

Once everything is on the cloud and organized, photo sharing with your loved ones is as simple as sharing a folder with an email or text. You can also give other friends and family members editing access to a shared folder to add their photos easily.

Keep the memories you treasure safe and secure in the cloud

Back up photos automatically, organize albums, browse photos, and share them with family members in moments.

A visual representation of the Dropbox interface, showing files stored in a Dropbox account.

Get your crew on Dropbox Family

With the Dropbox Family plan, everyone in your household can share their pictures in The Family Room folder. Get plenty of storage space and save a lot of money when you split a plan between parents, kids, and siblings. It's a great way to stay connected even when you are apart.

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