Find Your Digital Photos to Organize

Sort through old photos. It's that to-do list item that keeps getting pushed down to make room for tasks that aren't so over-whelming.

- SHARA TIBKEN

Who even knows where all those digital files are? There are tens of thousands of images in your iCloud. And more in your Google and Facebook accounts. And your dusty old hard drives. And even those old photo CDs you got from Walgreens a million years ago.

But you've got to start somewhere, and now is the time. Plan to download photo files from wherever they might be stashed. Set up a system such as a spreadsheet or sticky notes to keep track of all the places you've checked, advises David Shor, co-founder of Tidy Haus, a home- and digital-organization company based in Fort Worth, Texas.

"You want to have a little bit of project management in place so you don't mess up," he says.

Here's a checklist for making sure you don't miss anything.

Search your Mac or PC

Think all your photos are stored in that folder neatly labeled Pictures? Think again. Odds are high that images are lurking in a Downloads folder or other random corners of your laptop.

On a Mac, you can search by kind and select "image" or even specific image file types, including JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, BMP and HEIC. (You can also search for "movie" files.)

On Windows, you can search inside the taskbar, and can narrow down your query by specific file types.

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