How to organize your million photos

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

7 easy steps to get rid of digital clutter on your computer.

1. Create an Inbox

This is, quite simply, a folder for all the new photos you have to process. Everything is in accordance with the Getting Things Done methodology.

When you upload a batch of new pictures from your smartphone or digital camera, they are first sent to Inbox. And only after processing - to the main archive. This guarantees the maintenance of order: unparsed images will not interfere with already structured ones.

If you are just starting to dismantle your voluminous collection, then send all available photos to Inbox without hesitation. And move them to the archive only when you put them in order.

2. Remove duplicates

In any large archive, you will surely find a bunch of duplicates that are either absolutely identical or differ slightly. Especially a lot of such photos appear if you like to shoot in series, and then you are too lazy to delete unnecessary pictures. So you should start organizing your archive by destroying duplicates.

Lifehacker has already compiled a list of the best apps for removing duplicate files - you can choose from them. Or use specialized programs, sharpened specifically for the search for duplicate images, for example. Most photo cataloging software like Lightroom, darktable, and XnView also have built-in duplicate removers.

Those who transfer pictures from mobile devices to their archive can start deleting similar photos right on the phone using special applications so that only original photos are sent to the computer.

3. We remove bad or damaged pictures

When duplicates and similar photos are deleted, it is worthwhile to go through the remaining ones and manually clean up a completely frank marriage: blurry, blurry, not sharp enough, too dark or just damaged images.

This will take quite a long time, especially if you are working on an archive that you haven’t taken apart since you placed the first photo in it. But you can make your task a little easier if you process files in the Inbox folder in portions.

4. Sort photos into folders

Manual sorting

The collection cleared of duplicates and images of inadequate quality must be sorted into folders. How you organize your photos depends solely on your needs and imagination. Can be structured chronologically or thematically. In the first case, the images are sorted by date - year, month, day. In the second - according to events, places, people and objects that are captured on them.

But it's best to combine the two. There is a more or less universal folder structure that many photographers use. It looks like this:

Photo Archive / Year / YYYY. MM. DD - Event or Location / Image Files

This way the folders will always appear in an orderly way. And you can easily find the photos you need if you remember when they were taken or what is shown on them.

Automatic sorting

Naturally, it will take a lot of time to manually scatter gigabytes of existing photos in folders. But you can entrust this to special programs. For example, catalogers like XnView, DigiKam or Adobe Bridge. Or FastStone Image Viewer. All of these applications have built-in tools for automatically sorting image files into folders. The latter are created based on the EXIF data of the photos. Scattering thousands of pictures in a couple of minutes in this way is much easier than doing the same job manually for hours.

You can also customize how the subfolders are named. Then you just have to go through them and add notes - to which event or object they refer. Do not be lazy: this way you will easily navigate in your photo archive, and not try to painfully remember what date this or that picture was taken.

5. Putting tags and rating

This step is optional. It makes sense to add tags and ratings if you are using a cataloging program such as ACDSee, Adobe Lightroom, XnView, or darktable. Those who use regular file managers, Explorer or Finder will do fine without this item.

However, in large collections, tags are useful. For example, you want to find a photo, but don't remember when it was taken. You can say what is depicted on it and where it was filmed, but the exact date has been forgotten. In this case, tags will help you. The principle of their organization depends only on your imagination. You can use the names of people captured in photographs, the names of events, places and objects as tags, so that later you can easily search for pictures by associations.

It's the same with the star rating. Although we cleaned out a frank marriage before organizing the collection, you still may not like all the photos in the archive equally. To highlight your favorites and dismiss those that do not deserve attention, you can use the rating system.

6. Choosing a storage location

Now that the archive is finally put in order, it's worth thinking about where you will store it.

• On your home computer. Most amateur photographers do this as it is the easiest option. This method has a drawback: you need to turn on your desktop computer to access your pictures. It is not very convenient if you need to quickly show a couple of photos to the guests who have come.
• External media. A large external hard drive can hold your entire collection. It's easy to take it with you wherever you go. True, without a computer at hand, you will not be able to view photos, because not all smartphones and tablets support the connection of external drives, even with an OTG cable.
• In cloud services. We've already picked the best cloud storage for photos. This is a good choice for small collections, but it can be quite costly to store huge archives as all services limit free space.
• On the home media server. Option for the most advanced users. Buy a cheap computer in a miniature case (or adapt your old unused netbook for this - you won't need much power), add a couple of external hard drives and connect it to your home LAN. Voila. You can view the photo archive from any device - computers, smartphones, tablets, TVs. Personal cloud with no monthly payments or subscriptions.

7. Making backups

After all the above manipulations, set up an automatic backup on your computer. It is never superfluous. The system can be reinstalled, applications and music downloaded from the network, but the photographs we all have are unique. So do not be lazy to make regular backups. Our guide will help you with this.