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Our photo collections have a way of growing and multiplying like weeds, and tidying all the photos up can be a daunting task. With the right tools and approach, however, organizing all our photos is less of a chore.
10. Clean Up Duplicates, Bad Dates, and Other Issues
Ever have a set of photos think they’re from another date in the future? You can fix this metadata issue with a few useful tools, get rid of duplicate photos, and otherwise make more sense of your photo collection. You can also quickly rename photo (and other) files in bulk with a simple shortcut.
9. Easily and Automatically Share Your Photos Everywhere
If you like sharing photos, you can use Wappwolf or IFTTT to automatically upload your photos to places like Facebook and Flickr. Admittedly, this doesn’t really keep your computer’s photos folder from being a mess, but your favorite photo sharing sites will have all the photos you want uploaded without any work on your part.
8. Automatically Upload All Your Photos to Flickr
Similarly, after installing Flickr’s new photo tools on your computer and/or phone, you can have all your photos automatically backed up/shared in one place—up to a free 1 TB’s worth of space. Even if your computer’s photos folder is disorganized, on Flickr you can automagically sort by photo categories or date and bulk edit the photos’ metadata.
7. Use Dropbox Instead of Photo Management Apps
If you prefer Dropbox, in three steps you can get all your photos organized in Dropbox and not bother with photo management software. You just need a clear folder structure and syncing turned on. 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 photo hosting site—better than Dropbox when it comes to free storage space and editing tools. You can automatically back up photos to Google with unlimited storage space (if you keep the resolution low enough), and intelligently search your photo collection with some Google-fu, or just enjoy Google Photo’s auto-organization of your photos.
5. Sync and Sort Your Photos in OS X’s New Photos App
In the new Photos app on Mac, you can sync the photos across your devices either through iCloud or My Photo Stream. Here’s how. Also, you can use Photo’s “Smart Albums” feature to automatically sort your photos and rearrange them by your favorites, specific dates, and more—or use Hazel to sort by location. You might want to add some Automator actions too, for things like adding photos to specific albums and more.
4. Tackle Generations’ Worth of Family Photos Strategically
There really is no easy way to tackle a gazillion photo prints, negatives, and digital photos. You can, however, approach this daunting task with a plan. Lifehacker readers suggest starting with the oldest relative and then going down the family age tree, using Picassa’s face recognition feature, scanning and saving photos into folders organized by family person’s name, and/or organizing photos by “era.” Organize as you go.
3. Future-Proof Your Digital Photos with Smithsonian Institute-level Archiving
Digital photos are great, but we all probably have way too many of them. Delete bad photos, print out the best ones, and back up, back up, and back up. It takes time and effort, but if you want your photos to last forever, that constant photo processing is necessary. Even 10 minutes a day of organizing during TV commercials will help get your photo collection under control.
2. Get All Your Photos in One Place
You probably have photos buried in your emails. Scattered across your phone, tablet, and computer. Scattered across the web. Choose one folder to store your photos, and use tools like Lost Photos for email or even Facebook’s shared photo albums to consolidate your photos into one place. (You can archive every photo you’re tagged in on Facebook or elsewhere too.) If photos are stuck on your phone and not automatically backed up to Dropbox, Google, OneDrive or the other tons of photo organization tools, you’ll need to regularly manually import those photos. Also, remember to back up that consolidated photos folder, wherever it’s hosted, lest you lose your most important files.
1. Use a Folder and File Naming Structure That Makes Sense
To really get your photos under control, whether just for you or if they’re shared photos, you’ll need a system. I organize by year, then monthly subfolder YYYY-MM, and then special occasion subfolders within the month, separating original photos from edited ones, but you can use any organization system that makes sense to you. (You could even use a batch file to automatically rename photo files with the date-filename structure.) Whatever you do, just like you need to have a system for organizing your other digital and non-digital files, make it as easy as possible for your future self to find the pictures you’re looking for. (And did I mention you should back up your photos?)
Lifehacker’s Weekend Roundup gathers our best guides, explainers, and other posts on a certain subject so you can tackle big projects with ease. For more, check out our Weekend Roundup and Top 10 tags.
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