Organize Your Photos With This Windows App
Windows: I wouldn’t be surprised if you have folders after folders of photos that you swear you’ll be able to sort “someday.” For me, this day was this weekend. For some reason, I felt like spending a few hours trying to figure out my life history of a photograph that I dropped into a large Sort folder on my network storage device.
I was dreading this task because I find programs like Lightroom or Capture One stressful. While they make it incredibly easy to organize your photos by their EXIF data – when and where they were taken, what camera did you use, etc. – figuring out the nuances of cataloging and how to map your virtual folders or filters to real folders on your computer, or storage device, I have a headache.
This is why I was thrilled when I stumbled upon the Windows PhotoMove app that helped me get rid of my messy image archive. The free version does a thorough and fast analysis job wherever you store your photos by reading any EXIF data and automatically creating and moving (or copying) your images to folders. The app takes almost no time to set up and is easy to understand — much faster than learning the ins and outs of a real cataloging app that you could (or should?) Still use.
The free version of PhotoMove doesn’t have a lot of settings to tweak, but they are important. First, you select the folder that the application should analyze (and include subfolders!), As well as the target folder where your photos will ultimately be placed – the new folders that PhotoMove creates.
In the free version of the app, you only have two folder structures to choose from, and that sort of granularity – sorting images into folders by year, month, and the date you took them – can be annoying. However, there is a simple solution for this; once you go through the process and PhotoMove creates tons of folders based on the dates the images were taken, you can simply go to their parent folder in explorer (month), search by pattern (“*. *”) and move all the photos. found by Windows, down to the month (or year) folder, depending on your personal preference.
The only feature that can convince me to buy the professional version of PhotoMove (for only $ 9) is the duplicate finder. In other words, if PhotoMove detects that two images have the same name or the same EXIF data (of your choice), the paid version of the app can automatically rename the duplicates, overwrite the duplicate of the original, or move the duplicate to a special folder “you’ll want to look into this folder manually “. If you don’t organize your photos well, it can save you tons of time.
Finally, PhotoMove can also do similar magic when it cannot detect any EXIF data in your photos. If so, it might just move the photos into ordered folders based on when the files themselves were created – not a bad idea – or move all those photos to a separate Unknown folder. You will need the pro version of the app for these features, but $ 9 isn’t much to ask for these amenities.
In terms of the organizational session, I was thrilled that PhotoMove handled roughly 90 percent of my huge photo library without any problems. Photos that he could not address – and I had a feeling that they would – it did not take me long to manually move to the right folders. At least it took me much less time than trying to organize all 25,000 images from scratch.