[Closed] Organise My Photos! (Please)

I've just been through this & am not sure I made the best fist of it, to be honest.

I used to have random folders, so stuff like: Holiday pics, Friends & family, Mountain Biking etc...and then within those folders there would obviously be sub-folders. These were largely pre-fixed with the date, so looking back through them was relatively simple - each folder started with 2019-05-01 for example, so they'd end up in date order.
This worked OK, but there were obviously times when categorising certain pictures was difficult & I'd end up with loads of SD card downloads in temp folders waiting to be 'sorted'.

I recently moved all my stuff over to a NAS drive, so before doing that I went through and had a bit of a cull to try and clean the pics up before transferring them.
I then decided it would be a good idea to stick everything in date order & just have the top-level folders called 2008, 2009, 2010 etc.

The reality is that I now can't find a bloody thing! Well, I can but it takes a lot longer. Whereas before if I wanted to look at a certain folder of holiday pics I could just go straight to my 'holiday' folder, I now need to try & remember what year that holiday was before I can get searching.....

I keep meaning to get some software that functions as a photo-editor & library/catalogue so I can tag photos and then just search for them via the tags. But the reality of it is that will probably never happen!

Probably not much help, really.

I use google photos. It's not too bad for organising past photos, but it's great at managing any new ones you take, if you use your phone that is.
After a trip it will group them together in a folder for you, e.g. "Weekend in Bath". Also has a search function so you can search bike, cat, dog etc and get all those pictures at once.

Picasa.

No longer supported, but works just great.

I have the last build install file if you want it.

As above, it’s not 2005 any more 😂

I take LOADS more photos these days, who has time to sift through them? Take the majority on my phone so they all have correct time/location data (although I suppose standalone cameras probably have GPS these days?)

Leave them alone in Apple Photo app, it lets me search by time/place/person etc, by content to some extent. Groups holiday snaps into an album. Plus everything is backed up on the cloud by default. It’s not perfect but it’ll do and it’s zero effort 😎

Sounds like you need a cataloging system. I use Lightroom which is part catalogue, part image manipulation.

Images are stored in date stamped folders, so 2019-08-16, etc. but that's not important to how it works. When you import/add photos you tag them with keywords so if I take shots of the JennRide I might tag them with: "JennRide", "Mountain biking", "Lake District", etc. You can do this as a block for all the shots you download in one session then do individual shots with tags like "Walna Scar", "Wasdale" and so on.

It does take a bit of work particularly if you are adding lots of shots from different trips at the same time or you want to mark up smaller groups of shots but it's one of those things that the more care you take when doing it the better the end result will be.

You can do things like "smart collections" where you basically set up filters but those filters don't just work on photos already in the collection but any new ones you add. Of course you can also manually search for photos with particular keywords.

This is one of the other latter-day pleasures that modern phones have stripped us of.

Sitting down on a wet Sunday afternoon going through your old photo albums is infinitely more pleasurable than sitting in front of a laptop cataloguing 1000's of photos you'll probably never look at again.

And when 36 photos cost £10 for film and developing - you picked your shots carefully! 🙂

I also need to do something like this after lazily dumping files on to a NAS. Is there something that is reliable at getting rid of duplicates?

I'm another one still using Picasa 🤣 I don't know if it does tags though, that would be good but I'm not going to tag my photo library if I end up switching software.

I tried a trial of Lightroom and didn't get the hand of the workflow before the trial expired so never bought it. Is it subscription only now? Not a chance I'm going to pay £100 a year for it.

I've tried a few software cataloguing apps, but always go back to doing it manually.

As mentioned in a post above, each 'shoot' gets a folder prefixed with the date (YYYY MM DD) and a descriptive title. Raw images get dumped into there and sifted with any deadwood deleted. Edited images also go into the folder but do get renamed (YYYY MM DD shoot title NN). These folders get backed up to Flickr and an external HD.

Phone shots (most of them these days - hardly ever get the 'big' camera out any more) also get auto backed up to Google Photos. Don't do anything else with those - just rely on its auto cataloguing and search functions if I need to find anything.

I think most Adobe products are subscription based now. My version of Lightroom is fairly old so it's standalone.

I only ever really used Picasa as an online photo album along the lines of Flickr and Imgur, it was the easiest way to get lots of shots of fell races available. No idea if it does tags.

FastStone Image Viewer - doesn't look too great, but good for organising and tweaking stuff.

Might be worth a look. And free.

GlennQuagmire

FastStone Image Viewer

Hmmm, cheers! That looks like quite a good option.

Does anyone know whether the tags get stored in the exif data, so they are available for other programs to use?
I.e. If i use Lightroom (for example) to tag all my pics & then swapped over to that FastStone viewer above, would the tags get carried over from Lightroom, or would I have to start again.

I am not averse to paying for a good solution for cataloguing/editing. I have considered On1 Photo RAW, which costs around $80 or Paintshop pro for around £70

DigiKam is another free option, can do loads of stuff. Has the option to store the tags in the photo files, so other software can use them.

@sumpy01 - Lightroom stores its metadata in an SQLlite database but apparently there's an option to store it in the file itself via an option I've only just found out about when verifying this answer. You have to select the files you want to do this for then right click, choose "metadata"->"Save metadata to files". I don't think there's an option to do this by default.

Reading around it a bit, it's not as simple as you might think, Lightroom uses some internal calculation to decide whether to save the info in the file's own exif block or use an XMP sidecar file instead.

Short answer: WTFK

I used to have random folders, so stuff like: Holiday pics, Friends & family, Mountain Biking etc…and then within those folders there would obviously be sub-folders. These were largely pre-fixed with the date, so looking back through them was relatively simple – each folder started with 2019-05-01 for example, so they’d end up in date order.
This worked OK, but there were obviously times when categorising certain pictures was difficult & I’d end up with loads of SD card downloads in temp folders waiting to be ‘sorted’.

This is what I try to do now, including the 100s of pics in the "To sort" folder.

Cheers all. I have used Fast Stone for years but something I never got it to do reliably was sort photos by date taken in a folder with photos from more than one source, I might give it another go on the new computer but haven't installed it yet.

Google photos is fine if I only want to look at them on my phone and we have had success with sharing between the two of us using it, but any albums created can't be copied to the computer with the structure kept. They've also just turned off the Google Drive Sync which is a right PITA as it's the way I used to get my phone photos to the computer. The content searching is pretty good eg. search for "Dog".

I've used Picasa in the past, I'd rather use something a bit newer and still supported though.

Just installed Adobe Bridge to play with (as it's free), I don't want to pay the subscription for anything else from them, and going to give DigiKam a shot now cheers.

On OneDrive (paid) and filed by year/month.  Generally can then get to what I am looking for by searching for the general topic e.g. 'horse' or 'beach' and then I get a thumbnail of those as OneDrive has some fancypants scene recognition stuff.  When I see what I want I can then open the folder it is in and I'm there.  It's not bad except it doesn't do the full face recognition thing.  For that I use photoshop elements but it's not great so most of the time I just use OneDrive.  All the photos sync between all my computers so it doesn't matter which one I'm on, they all upload.  Then if I mark them as offline they no longer take up space once uploaded.  Seems to work ok

My wife remembers where we were by year/month so it works for her as well 🙂

Its hard to recommend lightroom wholeheartedly for the subscription reason mentioned above (still on version 6 standalone here), but one underrated feature is that when you "import" files it will "grey out" any duplicate files which have already been imported.

It seems like a minor feature, until you find a "photos" directory on an old disk or an ancient phone backup with directories called "pics" "pics_new" "dcim" "dcim_old" "holiday" "holiday 2" "holiday final" etc etc.

Just try to import each dir. without even looking at the data and in a few minutes you'll know if this is unique data you need to deal with, or just another version of stuff you imported already.

Also good for incremental backups of phone pictures etc. and works for video files (in a very basic way).

(You can import while leaving the pictures in the same location, or have lightroom copy them to a new location and put in folders named by date (and possibly device?) to help kick off some organisation).