10 Best Ways to Improve Your Dirty Photo Collection
Our photo collections grow and multiply like weeds, and harvesting all of the photos can be a daunting task. However, with the right tools and approach, organizing all of our photographs becomes less of a challenge.
10. Remove duplicates, bad dates and other problems.
Do you ever have a set of photos that think they are from another date in the future? You can fix this metadata issue with a few helpful tools , get rid of duplicate photos, and otherwise give more meaning to your photo collection. You can also quickly rename photo files (and other files) with a simple shortcut .
9. Easily and automatically share your photos everywhere.
If you enjoy sharing photos, you can use Wappwolf or IFTTT to automatically upload photos to places like Facebook and Flickr. Admittedly, it doesn’t really keep your computer’s photo folder from clutter, but your favorite photo-sharing sites will have all the photos you want to upload uploaded to your favorite photo-sharing sites without any of your work.
8. Automatically upload all your photos to Flickr.
Likewise, after installing the new Flickr photo editing tools on your computer and / or phone, you can automatically back up and share all your photos in one place – up to 1 TB of free space. Even if your computer’s photos folder is disorganized, on Flickr, you can automatically sort photos by category or date and edit photo metadata in bulk.
7. Use Dropbox instead of photo management apps.
If you prefer Dropbox, you can organize all your photos in Dropbox in three steps and not worry about photo management software. You just need a clear folder structure and sync enabled. As a bonus, you can use Wappwolf to automatically edit photos before saving them to Dropbox.
6. Or use Google Photos as your photo management tool.
Google Photos (formerly Google+ Photos) is our favorite site for posting photos. Better than Dropbox when it comes to free storage and editing tools. You can automatically back up your photos to Google with unlimited storage space (if you keep the resolution low enough) and intelligently search your photo collection with Google Fu, or just enjoy automatically organizing your photos in Google Photos.
5. Synchronize and sort your photos in the New Photos app for OS X.
In the new Photos app on Mac, you can sync photos to your devices via iCloud or My Photo Stream. Here’s how . Alternatively, you can use the Smart Albums feature for photos to automatically sort your photos and organize them by favorites, specific dates, and more, or use Hazel to sort by location . You can also add some Automator actions for things like adding photos to specific albums and more.
4. Strategic solution to the problem of family photography for generations.
There really isn’t an easy way to deal with the sheer volume of prints, negatives, and digital photographs. However, you can approach this difficult task with a plan. Lifehacker readers suggest starting with the oldest relative, then walking down the family’s age tree using Picassa’s facial recognition feature, scanning and saving photos to folders organized by family member’s name, and / or organizing photos by “era”. Organize as you go.
3. Keep your digital photos safe with Smithsonian-level archiving.
Digital photography is great, but we all probably have too many of them. Delete the bad photos, print the best ones, back up, back up and back up . It takes time and effort, but if you want your photos to last forever, continuous photo processing is necessary. Even 10 minutes a day during TV commercials can help keep your photo collection under control.
2. Collect all your photos in one place
There are probably photographs in your emails . Scattered across your phone, tablet and computer. Scattered across the network. Choose one folder to store your photos and use tools like Lost Photos for email or even shared Facebook photo albums to combine your photos in one place. (You can back up each photo you’re tagged in on Facebook or somewhere or another .) If photos are stuck on your phone and are not automatically copied to Dropbox, Google, OneDrive or other tons of tools for organizing photos , you’ll need to regularly manually import these photographs . Also, don’t forget to back up this combined photo folder wherever it is so you don’t lose your most important files .
1. Use a naming structure for folders and files that makes sense
To truly control your photos, whether it’s just for you or if they’re published , you’ll need a system . I arrange by year, then by month in YYYY-MM subfolders, and then in special occasion subfolders for a month, separating the original photos from the edited ones, but you can use any organization system that makes sense to you. (You can even use a batch file to automatically rename photo files with a date and file name structure.) Whatever you do, just like you need a system to organize your other digital and non-digital files, make it as easy as possible for yourself in the future to find the pictures you are looking for. (And did I mention that you should back up your photos?)
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