The Memory Curator with Allison Lee

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The Memory Curator with Allison Lee

The Memory Curator is an online course for busy mums/moms who want to organise their digital photos

12/08/2026

Q: Is iCloud a backup?
(Or is it syncing?)

A: iCloud is primarily a syncing service, not a full backup strategy. Many people assume their photos exist safely in multiple places, but often there’s only one high-resolution copy living in iCloud. A stronger setup is to keep a copy of all your photos on a device you control like your computer or an external hard drive. And keep a copy in iCloud or another cloud service.

Comment SOFTWARE and I'll send you the link to my free workshop. Start building your own organised collection that is stored on a device you own. Totally protected and not just hanging out in the cloud.

11/08/2026

You know your photos are somewhere on your computer.

But do you actually know WHERE? 😬

If I tell you to open File Explorer… do you know where to go?

What about Finder?

Do you know why you might have TWO Pictures folders on a PC?

Why OneDrive seems to have taken over?

Where to find the date a photo was taken?

How much space is left on your computer?

Or where your photos actually live on a Mac?

These might sound like basic questions, but they are some of the things I see people get confused about ALL THE TIME.

And when you don't understand what you are looking at on your own computer, organising your photos becomes so much harder.

So this month's short course is:

**Navigating Your Photos on Your Computer: Mac and PC**

We are going right back to basics and taking a tour of the parts of your computer you need to understand to organise your photos.

File Explorer. Finder. Pictures folders. OneDrive. iCloud. Metadata. Storage. External drives. Zip files. The Recycle Bin.

All explained in plain English and specifically in the context of YOUR PHOTOS.

Comment **COMPUTER** and I’ll send you the details.

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story. I would love to help you too!

10/08/2026

Most people think organising photos means doing everything manually.

Dragging.

Renaming.

Comparing duplicate photos one by one.

That's why so many people give up before they really get started.

What most people don't realise is that Lightroom Classic can do so much of the heavy lifting for you.

It can automatically sort your photos, find duplicates, group similar images and help you organise decades of memories in a fraction of the time it would take by hand.

The software isn't making decisions for you.

It's simply reading the information that's already stored inside your photos and following your instructions.

Once you understand how it works, organising your photo collection becomes much faster and far less overwhelming.

Comment **SOFTWARE** and I'll send you the link to my free workshop where I'll show you exactly how it works.

09/08/2026

I know this is a bit against the grain

But I don't think your entire photo collection should depend on a single cloud service.

Whether that's iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive or Dropbox.

I am not against these services. Most of my students use them in their workflow.,

The problem comes when they're the **only** place your family memories exist.

You're putting one company in charge of decades of your family history.

I'd rather you be in charge.

I recommend creating a **Master Photo Collection**. One complete, organised photo collection stored on your **computer or an external hard drive** that you control.

From there, you can back it up, copy it, and choose whichever cloud service works best for you.

Your photos stay with you, even if your technology changes, prices go up or your needs change.

That's the system I teach because I want you to have confidence that your family memories are organised, protected and under your control.

Comment **SOFTWARE** and I'll send you the link to my free workshop where I'll show you exactly how it works.

08/08/2026

Looking to sort out your photo mess?

Here are three tools I use everyday to keep my family photo collection organised and safely backed up.

1. Adobe’s Lightroom Classic.
I coudn’t live without this program. It helped me automatically sort out tens of thousands of photos a decade ago and has helped me keep my collection organised everyday since then. I can always find the photos I want when I want them and know that other people can too if I am not around.

2. An external hard drive.
I don’t have room to store my 100,000 photos on my computer so I use an external hard drive. That way I don’t need to worry about running out of space. I also keep a copy of my photos on a second external hard drive just in case something were to happen to the first one.

1. Dropbox.
I automatically backup my phone camera roll to Dropbox through the Dropbox app. I also keep a copy of my most important photos in Dropbox organised in folders. That way I know they are all safe and accessible when I am away from my computer

Want to learn how to sort out all your messy photos? Comment SOFTWARE and I will send you the link to my free workshop.

07/08/2026

Walking into the electronics store and staring at the wall of external drives can be super intimidating (not to mention confusing.

Here are some tips on how to choose:

✅Consider size and type not so much brand. If you buy a reputable brand they are all about the same. Reputable brands are Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital, La Cie, Samsung... most of the ones you see at the store are a-ok. OFF MARKET BRANDS ARE LESS RELIABLE.

✅A typical family photo collection spanning 20 years has an average of 50K to 100K of photos and videos. 100K is about 1 TB of data. So that you have room to grow, I recommend most people buy a 2TB hard drive.

✅The two main types of hard drives are regular portable external drives and solid-state drives. Solid-state drives are likely to last longer because they have no moving parts inside. However, solid-state drives (SSDs) are more expensive. Often it is better to have two redundant regular drives than only one SSD

✅Consider buying an extra drive to backup your photos for safe-keeping. The most important thing about photo storage is to back it up.

Now you can shop with confidence!

Want to learn how to organiseypur photos on local device? Comment SOFTWARE and I will send you the link to my free workshop.

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story.

06/08/2026

Most people think finding duplicate photos means sitting there comparing them one by one.

It doesn't.

Lightroom Classic has **four different tools** that can automatically find different types of duplicates and similar photos. Each one does a different job, and once you know when to use each one, cleaning up your photo collection becomes so much faster.

The trick isn't finding the "best" duplicate finder.

It's knowing **which tool to use for which type of duplicate.**

That's exactly what I teach inside my free workshop, along with how Lightroom Classic can automatically sort, organise and manage decades of photos.

Comment **SOFTWARE** and I'll send you the link.

05/08/2026

Q: What’s the best way to download all my photos from Google Photos?

A: Use Google Takeout. Google Takeout will package your photos into zip files and send you a link via email to download those files. Note you only have 7 days to download everything once the export is ready, so plan for that. If you want to preserve your albums in Google Photos, download them one by one from the website Google Photos.

Once you have a copy of your photos, you’ll need a system to organise them along with all your other digital photos from all those devices. Comment SOFTWARE and I'll send you the link to my free workshop on how to do just that.
Start building your own organised collection.

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story. I would love to help you too!

04/08/2026

Ever wondered how to get a copy of all your photos from Apple?

It’s easier than you think — and it’s one of the best things you can do to protect photos.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the simple steps to request your photo archive from Apple, so you can keep your own backup and start getting organised.

Save this post for when you’re ready to try it.

And keep an eye out for my next post — I’ll show you what to do once those ZIP files arrive. It is super important to have a system so you don’t create a bigger mess.

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story. I would love to help you too!

03/08/2026

If you remember taking film to be developed your photos are probably everywhere.

On your phone, iCloud, old computers, hard drives and more. The average number of places is 7.

When everything is scattered like this, organising them feels overwhelming because you can’t see everything in one place.

So you try to organise each location separately.

That’s where it gets super messy and hard.

Consolidating your photos manually is the right thing to do… but it’s slow and time consuming without the right tools

This is why I use specific tools to build what I call a Master Photo Collection - one organised place for all your photos. Without it taking years.

Comment SOFTWARE and I’ll send you the details for my free workshop to learn more.

Address

Sydney, NSW

Website

http://www.memorycurator.com/

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