In The Cloud: 6 Tips for Organizing Your Photos

There are currently over 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world, all with the ability to take pictures at a moment’s notice. 

Mothers and fathers are taking hundreds of shots at their baby’s first birthday. Wedding photographers could end up with thousands of photos that need to be distributed amongst the wedding party. 

After a long day with a camera, the last thing you want to do is to start organizing your photos. That could be a long job if you don’t handle it the right way. 

Here are six tips to tackle that task. 

1. Delete the Excess

When you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of photos, the first thing you need to do is lighten your load. Go through your album or folder and get rid of the photos that were bad, accidents, or not relevant. 

Often, you’ll also have repeat photos that are unnecessary or ones that are out of focus. 

That’s not to say you should go culling a majority of the photos you’ve taken. You’ll likely repeat this step when you’ve sorted your photos into different categories. 

In fact, deleting photos will happen throughout the entire process of sorting them out. Especially if you edit photos and will get a better look at a photograph’s flaws. 

Try not to be dismayed if you only end up with a few good shots. What’s important is that they captured the moment well. 

2. Pick Your Favorites

While you’re sorting out your pictures, you should also be single out the ones that stand out. Basically, pick out the ones you like the most. 

This is easily done on all smartphones in the gallery app. Favorited photos will be placed in a separate album and can be dealt with away from the bulk. 

After you’ve gone through and made your top choices, you can then transfer those photos immediately to whatever storage you have.

With the best out of the way, you can go back to freely deleting whatever other options left over. Or you could stop there and clean out the rest of your storage.  

3. Choose Your Storage Location

Now that you have a set of photos you’re keeping, you’ll need to decide where you’re actually going to put them. Your two main options are as follows: cloud storage and physical storage. 

Cloud storage is the hip new kid on the block. When you hear the term cloud storage, that means storing your photos on a company’s private servers through the internet. 

Google Drive, Dropbox, and iCloud are just three of many cloud-based storage options. Most of them offer a limited amount of free storage space that can be greatly expanded with monthly payments. 

Cloud storage benefits from being extremely accessible, requiring only an internet connection to have full access to your library of photos. That is also its biggest negative because without the internet you have zero access. 

Physical storage is the original form, requiring a hard drive to transfer files into.

Two things to consider with physical storage are purchasing one with enough storage space and ensuring it is formatted to deal with your computer or laptop. 

NTFS, for example, allows the largest file size to be transferred for Windows computers, but some programs even allow NTFS for Mac.  

4. Sort Your Photos

When you actually get around to transferring your photos, you won’t want to send them bundled together in a single folder. After all, you might need to easily find certain photos in the future. 

So, how to organize digital photos on your computer?

Of the many ways, you can sort your photos, some of the most important are by date, event, and location. 

Depending on how many photos you have on your camera roll, you may decide to make folders for either every month or every group of months. A yearly dump will be too large and unorganized.

You might also organize them based on whether they happened at a specific event or location, giving you a snapshot into a trip you’ve made. 

Once your photos are all sorted, they’re also now much more easily copied or shared, which leads to the next tip. 

5. Make Multiple Backups

When you’re dealing with important photos, never settle for a single storage location. Always backup your important documents just in case something goes wrong.

Some people store everything on an external hard drive. You can carry it with you anywhere, transfer files quickly without needing a good internet connection, and it can even stream directly onto your television. 

But hardware can fail, and storing your life on a single device could lead to you losing everything. 

With cloud storage, you run much less risk of this happening, but systems can go down. Information can still be lost on what was previously a secure network. 

Backups save you from situations you could have never expected. 

6. Compress to Save Space

Organizing your photos isn’t limited to sorting files and making backups. You can also be a bit tech-savvy and compress these folders to make even more space. 

Compression is used on computers to help save space by shrinking down folders, typically into .zip or .rar files. You know, those files you need to unpack to get access to the information within. 

Compressing your folders is a key part of photo organization. The key is to compress large folders of images you want to keep but know you won’t access often. 

While Windows and Mac have the capability to compress folders, you might also consider a 3rd party program that could compress and unzip your photos better, such as Winzip and WinRAR. 

Organizing Your Photos the Smart Way

There are always going to be different ways to store your photos that weren’t mentioned here, so shop around. Look up reviews for cloud or physical storage and make an educated choice.

Now that you know these tips for organizing your photos, feel free to be the shutterbug you always wanted to be and take as many pictures as you can. 

Stick around and check out some of our other articles for various other tips!