If you’re a new parent, grandparent, student, or even just consider yourself an amateur photographer, I’m sure that you struggle to keep tabs on all of your pictures. I used to spend hours categorizing, organizing, and sorting all of mine and my family’s pictures. Now I’ve arrived at a fail-proof method to stay on top of it.
Better yet this solution is free, easy, and only requires some minimal software. It will work on every operating system and even puts all of your files in one safe place free from fire, flood or any natural disaster. After all, pictures are some of the most precious things in the world. Although I think the world would be quite alright without as many selfies and pictures of our food, memories of family and friends should be archived forever.
Google Photos
The easiest way that I’ve found for normal humans to organize their pictures is using Google Photos. I really like iPhoto (the Apple way of organizing photos), however, it only works with Apple devices. Forget trying to get it to run on Windows! Google Photos is great for a number of reasons—most of all because it works on all Android phones, Apple devices, and Windows operating systems.
Google Photos will also store an unlimited amount of pictures for free. That’s right: as many pictures as you can possibly upload for no money at all. The only catch is that it will downscale your pictures to 16 megapixels. Sixteen megapixels is still a really high resolution, however, most phones take pictures with a much higher resolution. I’ve found that if you’re backing up scans of old family photos, you’ll be completely fine and you can store as many as you want.
Google Photos will automatically back up the photos from your mobile device and organize them for you. This is the absolute best feature of Google Photos because it takes location information from your pictures and will recognize faces from your pictures. You can then search for people, locations, and times using Google’s web interface. The reason that this is so great is because the Google Photos app will automatically upload your pictures and organize them for you.
I find that this saves so much time and effort that it’s definitely worth it. Furthermore, if you want to keep all of your mobile pictures full resolution, you still get 15GB of free storage.
Folder Structure
Now there are some people that prefer to keep all of their photos out of the cloud, which I think is completely reasonable. The trade off here is that you don’t get the super organizational powers of Google and you have to manage the photos yourself. Luckily before the age of Google Photos I came up with such a solution that works great for keeping thousands of photos and videos organized and easy to find.
It comes down to managing dates of photos. I keep top folders of years—for example, 2016, 2015, and 2014. Then underneath each year, I keep folders with the date and description of each group of photos. For example, a folder name would be “2016-12-25 Christmas with the Family.” I always put the year month and day in order followed by a short description. This way you can sort by name and Google Photos will sort your folders by year month and day.
If you have a bunch of random pictures that don’t deserve their own folder I put monthly folders together such as “2016-12 Misc”. This will toss all of your random photos into their corresponding month. Just by naming all of your folders in this simple way you can keep thousands and thousands of pictures and videos organized.
Even though Google Photos backs up your photos to their cloud, there’s always a risk (even though incredibly small) that they will lose your data.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
No matter which method you use, I have to stress the advice not to keep all of your eggs in one basket. Luckily, this advice is extremely easy to follow in the digital age because everything can be backed up. Luckily I have episodes on backing up your computer and mobiles devices. Even though Google Photos backs up your photos to their cloud, there’s always a risk (even though incredibly small) that they will lose your data. For this reason, it’s extremely important to keep at last two copies of all of your pictures.
This could be as simple as a backup hard drive or even a memory card or CD. Anything to keep multiple copies of your pictures.
Gift Ideas
Now what’s the use of having all of those perfectly organized pictures and videos if you don’t use them for anything? Luckily I have an entire episode dedicated to a ton of awesome gift ideas to put all of your great pictures into for sentimental and personal gifts.
Make Your Own Server
If you’re like me and you are the family, class, and work historian, you’ll have terabytes and terabytes of video and photos that can easily fill up multiple hard drives. The best way to keep this organized is to combine multiple hard drives into one large volume. This may seem daunting if you’re not the most technical person in the world. I’ve done a full podcast on how to build your own file server on the cheap. It’s exactly what I have and use at home and I have over 10TB worth of storage always backed up!a
Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com. And if you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post them on http://ift.tt/1xcMcmP.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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