10 Tips and Tricks for Photo Management

As ‘smart’ as smart technologies have become, they can’t read your mind. Nowhere is this more true than the file names and sorting of digital photos. Let’s look into tips and tricks for photo management.

Most file types take their names from pre-designated sources or contextual notes. A word file names itself after the first line, music is sorted by album or artist. When it comes to automatic photo management, the best you get is knowing the brand of camera that took the photo and maybe a time stamp.

To get your photos cataloged where you can find them when you want them, you’ll need some systems and programs to help.

The following tips will give you an idea of what you need and where to get it.

Photo Management Made Easy

Developing a system to manage photos requires three key lines of thought: accessibility, customization, and subject matter.

The following tips expand on each of these general categories.

Create Back Ups

Ideally, you want to access the photos you enjoy quickly. You also want to organize said photos in a way that makes sense to you.

A lot of these tips include paring down and sorting. Before you do any of that, back up all your photos to a cloud or a larger storage device.

That way, if you make a mistake (or simply suffer some regrets) in deleting photos, you can always go back and find your originals.

Create Folder Tiers

It is easier to think of things in broad categories that become more specific.

Start with folders for people, locations, objects. From there make internal folders for specific people, locations, etc.

Delete Duplicates

It’s easy to end up with a lot of extremely similar photos. Choosing between duplicate photos is easier if you use photo manager apps that scan images and present them side by side.

Group Faces

For people and pets, you can find all the photos of specifics through apps that use AI and algorithms to determine likenesses. This makes it easy to group all the photos of individuals without looking through your whole library.

Ground Places

Before you start taking photos at a location, add details through location settings. This will put tags in file descriptions that help you locate photos taken in places, regardless of what is visible.

Sort Dates

People and places change over time. Listing the date in the first of the file structure helps you find people faster. Don’t rely on the ‘sort by date’ function because that will sort by the date the file was added not when it was created.

Keyword and Tag

Photo organization technology isn’t limited to phases and places. You can also tag individual objects and then pull up photos with those tags for ease of sorting.

Physical or Digital?

Duplicate any photos you have printed to a ‘printed’ folder or add the tag to photos. This way you save cash by knowing if you have already created a physical copy.

Track Sources

Not all the photos you have are ones you took. If you use multiple devices to take photos, you want to know if the camera roll you’re looking at came from a higher or lower dpi source. Add tags to photos for the camera and the photographer to find these quickly.

Cross Index

Since storage is cheap, saving photos in multiple locations is a good idea. Don’t lose a photo of your favorite pet at your favorite place because you can’t remember if you saved it under places or pets.

More Tech Talk

Now that you’re a master of photo management, consider checking out some of our other articles on tech.