Need Help Organizing Photos?
The topic of photo organization has been on my blog to-do list for a while. About as long as my photos have been collecting into a mountain of duplicates, misfits and nameless files. The ongoing fires in LA County is my motivation to kick my photo preservation project into full gear. But for this monumental task, I need help!
As you all know, I love the idea of telling your stories on film and including beloved photos and memorabilia as well. But if you are like me, you have photos coming out of your ears…and phones…and memory cards and…yep. Well, that film would make another Gone with The Wind (3 hours, 58 minutes).
Can you imagine sitting down at your computer and going through every photo – organizing them into folders, deleting duplicates and blurry photos, renaming files, and, if you’re really into it, maybe touching-up some photos with editing tools. For perspective, I have over 40k pictures on my PC alone. If I took 5 seconds each to analyze, label or delete, that would be well over 40 hours of work.
Right.
Thankfully, there is software that will do all this for you!? Now, there is still some ‘work’ on your part, but depending on which software you go with, minimal time is required.
Why should you push yourself to dig into this project?
1. A fire is a VERY good reason.
2. Theft
3. Data loss
4. Documenting/Preserving family history
Where do you start? Here. I’ll give you a great overview of different classes of software (free to basic to advanced). Based upon your needs (How many photos? How much time do you have?), you choose the software and start the process. In no time, you will have all your photos cleaned, organized, labeled and maybe even edited 😉 Then you’ll be thanking me for taking that huge guilt-filled load off your shoulders. You’re welcome.
So let’s start with the freebies.
Google Photos/Apple Photos/Dropbox/One-Drive
For Who? For the people who already have some photos on these services and prefer not to move them. Or, just want to do the bare minimum at this point (baby steps on those baby photos.)
How much work for me?
These free services offer fast downloads, cloud storage and labeling capabilities. Some, like Google and Apple offer facial recognition. That helps. But you would still need to label them manually. And Google and Apple only offer minimal editing capabilities while Dropbox and One Drive do not offer any.
FastStone
For who? A basic, free service (Windows only) that provides more options than the other free services.
How much work for me?
The more you put in, the more you get out of it! With any basic software, there will be some upfront work in the labeling, but FastStone provides a more user-friendly/photo-friendly interface. You can also apply ratings to your photos.
As compared to the free services above, there are different views, more editing features, slideshow capability, and support for a bunch of different file types, include raw files.
Paid Software
The below software paid subscriptions offer more features, including AI and advanced tools for categorizing and tagging your photos.
Who? These services are for the folks serious about their photos – whether taking them and/or preserving them. There may be some initial work on your first bug download, but going forward, you will find great ease and maybe even pleasure in downloading your photos.
How much work for me?
Adobe Elements is the more fun, less heavy version of Adobe Photoshop. The interface is very intuitive and you’ll be able to quickly get the hang of editing your photos and discovering endless fun ways to edit and use your photos in various designs. With Elements comes the Adobe Element Organizer, where you will download and label all your photos. The screen views make it easy to view a bunch of photos at one time, easily picking out the less-than perfect ones and duplicates. This software not only has facial recognition, but auto-categorizes. You can still add your custom tags.
Excire Foto features run deep – from automatic keywording (YAY!) to people, face and duplicate searches. Super cool is the AI-prompt search. Say you remember there is a lighted tree and a dog in the photo – go ahead and search it!
Photo Director offers a free version or a much more expensive one for the photo and video enthusiasts. This is more of a non-professionals version of Photoshop. It’s more of an editing app than storage and organizing, which you can still do. This is great if you are passionate about design and social media content.
This one, I have to admit, I’m pretty excited about. It’s new on the market, so not much depth to the reviews yet.
In addition to the basic capabilities of editing, organizing and cleaning – it offers easy sharing (with distant family), permissions for other to see or make edits to your collection. It offers custom tags and AI smart tags. It offer cloud storage. If the in-app editing features weren’t enough, this software integrates with your favorite editing apps like Photoshop, DXO. And so many views – a map view, a calendar view, by folder or by smart tag. Any way you want it!
Once you settle on the software, there are a few things to keep in mind NOW that will make the future so much easier;
1. Back-up the back-up. Ideally, the experts recommend 3 copies: 1) on your local computer 2) on an external hard drive or card 3) off-site, or cloud storage and if you have printed photos, be sure to scan them, and if not, the very least, store them in a fire safe photo box.
*For older printed photos, you can still scan (or pay for scanning services) them so they are digital and can then be labeled cataloged and stored with all the digital photos.
**If they are only on your phone, look into the organizing and storage app “Slidebox”. There is a free version and a $4.99 a month cloud storage version.
2. Don’t get lazy on the tags. Think them through – if you would want to search on a particular picture, what keyword would you use? You can do by date, theme, event, family, person, all of the above.
3. Stay disciplined. Whether you train yourself to delete, tag and edit whenever you download new photos, or perhaps 2-4xs per year depending on how many you take – stay on top of it.
Good luck on your journey. Yes, it’s a journey (to start at least). Just remember you are preserving the memories that connect you to future generations.