How to organize your photos

If there were some sort of "saving" in the time of film photography in the choice and training of cadres (due to the relatively high costs of film rolls and especially development), the emergence of digital photography meant a total relaxation from this point of view.

There is space for any photo, from the memory stick of the device, to the storage space on the phone, and finally to the hard drive of your laptop or PC. If we also mention the photos we publish on Facebook or Instagram, we send them through Whatsapp or email and eventually store them in Google Drive, iCloud or Dropbox, it seems that space is really in constant expansion.

And if it is extraordinary that we do not miss a moment because of economics, it is less charming to have a huge volume of images to be viewed, sorted, edited, arranged in albums and, in the case of the least lucky ones, deleted.

After hundreds of photographs taken so, the photo canopy becomes difficult to handle and clean. And if we tell you that the photographic forecast in 2017 is 1.7 trillion shots taken globally, we already have a galactic challenge.

We have encountered this issue several times (yes, we are passionate about photography!) And that has motivated us to look for efficient solutions for managing the memories portfolio. Below we share them with you and hope to give you some good ideas.

Photo center

Imagine a kind of central station for all your photos, the place where all images are gathered, regardless of their origin (camera, phone, online downloads, friends messages). This photo center is where you'll need to collect all the photos before sorting or editing in any way.

Where should you set up this photo center? The first is a folder or, if you prefer, a hard drive (internal or external) dedicated exclusively to this purpose. The second option, which has the 24/7 availability advantage wherever you are, is a cloud storage account, similar to the purpose and structure of a folder that you create on your computer.

To make sure nothing is lost, our suggestion is to opt for storage in both environments. In this way, you will have so much mobility and the certainty that in case of a service interruption, your photos are waiting for you on computer or laptop.

To calculate the optimum size of the photo panel, we recommend that you approximate the current size of your photo collection and then double that value.

Organization of the photographic circuit

Coming back to the central station concept for your images, now is the time to think about Arrivals and Departures.

Where do your pictures come from during a month? What kind of images are there and what are the reasons or purposes for which you can store them?

When it goes on, how and to whom do you transmit these images? Send them to your friends, post them online, turn them into photo albums?

This kind of classification and understanding of the sources and destinations of your photos will help you organize them into intuitive categories, which will then be easy to respect.

Based on the findings of this analysis, you can create folders dedicated to photo types and sources. In their name, we recommend that you include both descriptive terms (Travel, Fun, Instagram) and calendar details (2017, Spring 2015 or November 2016).

Automation of photographic order

Once you have set the categories of images that fill your days with color, the final step is to set a simpler, and preferably automatic, way of assigning photos to the defined categories. More specifically, if this operation is exclusively manual, we recommend that you choose one day a week to allocate a few minutes for sorting new images and cleaning the space on the device they come from (phone, camera).

If you want to automate this allocation, the options are multiple:

• Automatic sync between your mobile device (phone, tablet) and your cloud storage solution (Drive, Dropbox, iCloud). This option can be enabled for both your device's camera and files from Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, or downloads from emails or from different sites.
• Using an application that syncs photos from different environments with your storage solution (PC, laptop). Some applications that are popular in this area are ACDSee 20, Zoner Photo Studio X, and PaintShop Pro X9 and Mylio.

But do not ignore, perhaps, the most enjoyable option of organizing and capitalizing on your photos - the photo album! And if you want to have your favorite pictures at your fingertips, a cup can be the perfect storage environment!