3 Tips of How to Organize Digital Photos
The past was certainly what many would call a different world. And when it comes to photography, that is especially true. Just think of the work that you had to do in ‘the old days’. You had to purchase the film, put it into your camera, snap sparingly so you didn’t waste any pictures, drop off the film to be processed, wait a few days, and then go pick it up. And that was just for twenty-four or thirty-six photos. If you processed the film yourself, you would have even more work to do. Plus, you wouldn’t know whether the images you had taken were of any use to you until you actually received them and held them in your hands. Many would be no good and have to be disposed of.
How to Organize Digital Photos
Now, thanks to the wonderful advancements in technology, we can take digital photos. This means there are really no limits (apart from memory space, but this is phenomenally large) when it comes to how many photos you can take. The truth is that we are taking more images today than at any other moment in history, thanks to digital photography. However, the simplicity of capturing photographs does not convert into the ease of maintaining all those shots. The majority of us have thousands of digital images scattered throughout our devices. This includes our phones, cameras, memory cards, laptops, and tablets.
Additionally, family members might easily find printed images in a closet or an old trunk. This is a gem, something that really speaks to them. But imagine years from now what might happen to all your images. They’re not stored somewhere for your grandchildren or great-grandchildren to find – without proper storage, they could be lost forever, and that includes not just memories but information for future generations to enjoy.
This is why digital photography organization is so crucial. So how can you go about ensuring that you are storing your digital images in the right way? Read on to find out how to organize digital photos.
1. Download Everything To Your Computer
Make it a practice to collect all of your photographs from your phone, camera, tablet, and other devices once a month and save them to a folder on your computer. Depending on how many images you take, you may wish to download more regularly. However, you should not wait more than a month otherwise the chore will become daunting.
Be careful to save your photographs to your computer after you’re through downloading them. Your photographs may be lost or disappear if the cloud server goes out of business, leaving you with no method of accessing them if you need them. When it comes to picture backup, internet services like Flickr and Dropbox are great. However, your computer should be the primary location for all your images, with the cloud as a helpful backup.
Additionally, it’s vital that you have a collection of original, unaltered pictures in your possession. The only photographs you should ever have on your PC are the ones you took with your camera (or whatever device you’re using). These are the originals, or negatives, of your photographs. Like negatives, you should save all of your images in a single, safe area, from which you may easily create further copies.
A laptop, a mobile phone, and a flash drive are among the photo-storing options you could use. If you are unable to collect everything at once, create a list of things you would want to digitize later.
2. Edit And Organize Your Photos On Your Computer
Next, on your computer, arrange your digital images in a manner that makes sense to you. Set aside some time for your first organising session. However, once you’ve developed a file system, storing each fresh batch of images will be much simpler during your regular upload sessions. For instance, when you download images, make a folder and name it. It is a smart way on how to organize digital photos.
Any photographs that are blurry, have people with closed eyes, or are almost identical to a slightly better shot can be removed at this point. By lowering the number of photo files you have to maintain and back up, this saves you storage space. Photos can be of any sort, from house party games to a family dinner table. If a photo is blatantly bad, most people have little problem getting rid of it, but deciding what else to remove might be difficult. Consider using a rating system or just keeping photographs that can tell a story of an event or a person in your collection if this describes you.
After you’ve created your folder, place it in a monthly folder, such as January, and leave the monthly folder on your desktop. You can then include any further images you shoot that month. Move the folder into a yearly folder labeled with the year at the end of the month.
Labeling folders with a date and an event, such as when you used a drone for the first time, for example (you can find out more about that if you click here), are two methods to identify and locate them. No matter what labeling system you develop, the goal is to be consistent, so you know what to search for when you want to locate a picture.
3. Save To The Cloud
When cropping, applying filters, or otherwise fiddling with photographs, make a copy first before making any changes to the original. As a result, if anything goes wrong, you can always return to the original and produce a new copy. But you also want a complete set of duplicate copies to act as archival backups in case your computer is damaged due to a natural disaster or hard disc failure, for example.
It’s preferable to store your backups on the cloud, where they can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection. In most cases, you’ll have to pay a monthly fee to get additional storage space than what you’ll get for free. You may be able to save money by simply creating a backup of your most cherished photographs.
You may need to manually begin a backup with some service providers, while others will perform it automatically at certain intervals or when a folder is changed (which you should do each time you upload new photos to your computer). It’s essential to remember that photo-sharing social media sites like Facebook and Instagram aren’t built to store backups.
Another option is an external hard disc. It comes with a lot of room for storage and is fairly priced. We hope you found some ways on how to organize digital photos.
