Storing your digital photos on your devices isn’t always as easy as it might sound.
We’ve all had those moments of panic after deleting an entire photo album from our hard drive. If your photos aren’t organized, this probably happens to you on a regular basis. Yet still, it’s such a chore to rearrange and organize stored photos that most people still neglect doing it.
In this post, we’re going to help you get sorted once and for all by giving you 9 tips for organizing your digital photos. You don’t have to be a photographer to take a lot of pictures these days, so keep reading and you’ll be better equipped to showcase, find, and store your online and downloaded photos once and for all.
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Delete Bad Photos Right Away
Unless you’re a photographer dealing with hundreds of photos at a time, you should have time after each shot to decide whether or not to actually keep it. If you get this done before you even upload them to your computer, then you never have to worry about going through and deleting once they’re already on there. Using a tool like MacPaw, you can delete and organize your photos in one fell swoop, so read the post about it on their site.
Should you forget to delete the bad photos before you start uploading, make sure to do it before it’s too late. Many people forget to delete photos and end up with hundreds more photos to go through to find the ones they want. This can literally take hours out of your day if you’re not diligent about it.
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Come Up With Organization Method
Before you start creating folders and naming them willynilly, draw a little mockup of the kind of directory you want to see. How you organize your photos should be intuitive to you, but it doesn’t have to follow any specific method. Whether you want to organize by location, date, or type of photograph, is up to you and really depends on how many photographs you typically take.
For instance, the average person might have a few hundred photos on their phone at any given time. When they go to upload these, it might be best to organize them by upload date, so that there’s a range of dates to go by. A more seasoned photographer might rather create folders based on the way they were shooting or the subject – something that makes it easy to find a specific group of photos rather than a wide range of different photos.
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Create Folders, Sub Folders, Etc.
Always create at least two levels of folders when organizing any type of digital file, but especially online photo albums. Having subfolders makes it so much easier to find the exact photo you’re looking for, saving you loads of time in the long run.
If you’re organizing photos by year, for example, you don’t just want all of your photos from that year in a folder – it would still take forever to go through. Having subfolders for each month immediately cuts down your search time, so long as you know when the photo was uploaded (or taken). You can go as deep as you want – weekly, daily – with subfolders.
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Rename the Files When Uploading
Another really helpful practice to get into is renaming the files after you upload them. Your smartphone or camera is just going to assign each photo its own file name, which won’t be very descriptive. It’ll make the process a bit longer, but giving photos more descriptive file names can make searching much easier.
When you do this, you can simply type the description of the photo you’re looking for into the search bar on your phone or file the search window on your computer. If you took some photos of a person, make the file name their name, then you can pull up all of those photos in a quick search.
Also read: 6 Tips to Easily Market Your Product
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Immediate Transfers
Being organized is all about being diligent. One of the most diligent things you can do to stay organized is to transfer your digital photos as often as possible. When you let photos accumulate on your device, it makes going through them to keep them organized so much more tedious.
Setting aside the time (and motivation) to rename and organize hundreds of photos at once is far less likely to happen than if do it once per week or every few days. Take 20 minutes a week instead of 3 hours per month.
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Back Everything Up
Always back up your photos. Data is never completely safe, whether you’re talking about online photos or downloaded photos. With the ones on your computer, keep them backed up on a hard drive, especially if they’re important to you.
A computer could crash, a phone can disappear, or a hard drive could collapse at any moment, but having your photos backed up on a second device keeps you safe from these mishaps. It can take a long time to back up a large number of big files like digital photos, but you can set it and forget it, so you won’t lose any free time.
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Favorite Your Favorites
Every photographer, professional and amateur alike, have their favorite photos they’ve ever taken. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to recall those photos immediately? Yes, it would, and your devices make it very easy to do this.
When you have a picture that you really like, then tag it as one of your favorites. That way, when you’re going through to look for photos, you’ll see the tag and know that it’s one that you really liked. You can also create a separate folder with all of your tagged photos in it, for extra easy recollection.
Organized Digital Photos Mean Less Stress Later On
Now that you know how to better organize your digital photos, you can start making your life easier. With organized photos, you won’t have to spend hours sifting through one giant folder to find the photo you’re looking for. Smart organization is a major stress saver.
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