How to upload, organize, and share family photos

Remember sitting with family, looking through photo albums, admiring how someone had spent hours meticulously curating each page? Photos in the shape of hearts, handwritten notes with the dates tucked neatly into the borders. Now those photo books are fading, and the tape's lost its stick. They've been stashed safely away in a box to be moved from closet to basement to garage. Very sentimental, but you’ll never be able to:

• Access everything instantly—old physical photos mean rummaging through boxes or hard drives just to find that one photo from 2003
• Organize your collection with ease—sorting by date, location, or even family member is impossible without smart tags and folders
• Share albums with one click—relatives can’t instantly view the latest birthday party photos from halfway across the world
• Preserve quality over time—your images don’t stay in good condition in physical form, and may even degrade on an external hard drive
• Create collaborative albums—it’s impossible to let everyone contribute photos from holidays or shared milestones without digital files
• Keep everything safe—physical or hard-drive-only pictures mean you invite the potential for water-damaged prints and misplaced USB sticks
• Free up physical space—once you digitize your memories, you can finally reclaim that top shelf in the closet

Now imagine your family can view full-resolution photos of all your precious moments—and you can see theirs. The beauty of storing your photos online is that you can keep them secure, organize them properly, and share them with the ones you love most. Think of all the shoeboxes you can recycle, space you'll save, and memories you'll share. It might sound arduous at first, but here are a few ways you can make that happen.

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. This process preserves your photos perfectly and is ideal for both long term storage and regular access.

Camera uploads

The easiest way to make sure all of your latest photos are safe and accessible is to automatically upload all of your images from your mobile device and camera to Dropbox. With this method you can:

• Set your mobile device or camera to auto-upload, so every new photo is instantly backed up
• Avoid worrying about manually transferring files or losing your favorite shots
• Make sure that your photos will always be accessible, organized, and protected—without you having to lift a finger

This is a fantastic first step if you want to improve your family photo setup. Once you start uploading your photos automatically, you won’t need to stress about saving more photos later. It’s a labor-saving way of managing photo uploads that your future self, and future family members, will appreciate.

One benefit of using camera uploads is that Dropbox will rename all of your photos from a number to the date you took them, making it much easier to stay organized, i.e., "IMG_1801.jpg" to "2024-04-26 15.30.42.jpg"

Another bonus: When you back up full-resolution photos and videos to Dropbox, you'll be able to delete them from your mobile device, freeing up storage space on your iPhone or Android device.

File requests

Trying to collect everyone's photos from a wedding, family reunion, or holiday celebration? Instead of creating an annoying email thread with your cousins, siblings, and friends, send everyone a file request and have them send their photos directly to your Dropbox.

Chasing people down is a hassle and there’s always someone who forgets, sends low-resolution files, or just clogs up the group chat with irrelevant messages. With a file request, you can send one simple link and have everyone upload their photos directly to your cloud storage—no logins, no confusion, just all the family photos in one place.

You can even create a shared folder so everyone has access.

Scan old photos

Instead of letting them fade or stay hidden in a box in your closet, make sure all of your old prints are secure. Quickly turn your mobile device into a document scanner and convert each photo into high-quality PDFs with the Dropbox mobile app.

Scanning old family photos might seem like a big job, but it’s simpler and much more fun than you think. With the Dropbox app you get an intuitive document scanner, so you can turn many years of memories into digital files in just a few sittings. 

Pro tip: Start with your most precious albums and go from there. It’s easy to jump back in whenever it’s convenient. You don’t have to worry about photos fading or albums getting lost anymore—your memories will be safe and easy to share. It’s worth doing, and you’ll be happy you started.

Facebook transfer integration

Many of us have been using Facebook as our photo storage for years. That’s fine, but it’s not the best place to upload pictures if you want a backup, you’re just not online that much, or you want to preserve those pictures. Instead of constantly logging in to social media, transfer your entire photo and video libraries from Facebook to Dropbox with the Facebook app integration.

Device and computer sync

If you’ve got clusters of photos on various types of storage from over the years, maybe scattered across internal and external hard drives, memory cards, or even optical media—it’s a good idea to consolidate these in one place. You can use Dropbox to manually select individual photos or folders you want to store in the cloud. Once synced, you can access them from all of your devices.

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. Luckily, Dropbox makes it very easy to organize your photos, and other files or folders, right from your cloud storage.

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 "2025-04-26 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 "2025-04-26 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 / 2025 / 2025-04 / 2025-04-26 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 2024_01.jpg," for example.

You could be even more specific, like "Paris_Oct 2024_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 via an email or text. You can also give other friends and family members editing access to a shared folder to add their photos easily.

No more endless email chains or lost attachments—just one shared space everyone can enjoy. It’s the easiest way to keep the memories flowing and the whole family connected.

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.