Five ways to organize your digital photos

Five ways to organize your digital photos

You have to do it once and for all, but you never find the time. We are talking about classifying and ordering your digital photos. You download them to a computer or to the hard drive every time you remember (or your mobile memory fills up, that's another) and you accumulate files and more files as if there were no tomorrow.

Cell phones have contributed to this kind of chaos of memories . We don't take one photo: we take many, non-stop, and we have several shots of each of the events in our life. In the end one (some, zero) turns out well and we end up accumulating more than five or ten photos blowing the candles on the cake, even if they all came out blurred.

How to deal with it? Apart from ordering your memories, it would be good if you clean the memory of your computer or hard disk and recover a large part of the copies to keep them in a safe source . Another very interesting option is printing. Today we want to help you organize your digital photos without dying in the attempt. Let's get down to business. At last!

edit pictures

1. The importance of selection

We are going to tackle this problem at its roots. We usually dump all the content of the mobile or camera card onto the computer, often in a common folder called "Photos". Then we are extremely lazy to have to select the good shots , the ones that are not.

We shoot the same target several times and then we don't check anything. That is the first thing you have to change. Imagine you are going to an event, let's have a birthday party. It would be good if when you get home you spend five minutes deleting all those captures that have not gone well and that it does not make sense for you to continue saving.

If you want to automate the task, you can also download an application that will do it for you, although you will always have to monitor the results. Gallery Doctor is a very interesting (and free) option that will help you identify blurry photos and eliminate those that are taking up space on your mobile unnecessarily.

images folders

2. Organize the images by folders

When professional photographers finish a shoot, they spend part of their time doing what they call "editing." It is about doing an important job of selection and organization . Our work and dedication here are essential.

Although some mobiles or cameras are capable of organizing images by folders and by capture date (the latter is done by all digital equipment), it is advisable to make a personal selection and try to organize the memories by themes, years or events.

For example, you can make compilations of folders with names of events or categories, as if you were making a small album of those of yesteryear: Formentera Holidays 2014, Luis' first year of life, Concerts 2016, Marta's birthday party ... and subfolders as you want and in this way, you will always find that photo you were looking for in the appropriate folder.

LaCie Fuel save photos

3. Choose the physical support well

Photos are very sensitive material. Today, many parents already store their children's entire lives in digital format: there are the photos of their arrival in the world and their first times of everything: the porridge, the park, the beach, nature, the animals ...

You may not be the first or the last that technology has given a dislike. A virus that has left our computer unusable, a failure that has made us unable to turn it on again ... What would happen if you lost all those photos, all of a sudden? We are sure that you would have the upset of your life.

That is why you have to choose a good support to store all that. A very interesting option is external hard drives. To speed up the process even more (and not have to spend several hours saving photos and moving files) you can opt for a hard drive that has WiFi , because this way you can synchronize the content wirelessly. If it can't be, nothing happens, but it is clear that it will be much more comfortable for you.

In the market you have several options, but we would recommend the WD My Passport Wireless Pro (with 2 TB of capacity and 200 euros) or the LaCie Fuel, which has already become a classic, with 1 TB of capacity and the possibility of creating your own WiFi network. The latter has a cost of 180 euros. If you want it with 2 TB, it will cost you 230 euros.

Dropbox

4. Save to the cloud

But what happens if our hard drive crashes? Well, in this case, the interesting thing would be to have a backup in the cloud . Nowadays there are many services that can help us keep all our snapshots safe.

For example, you have Dropbox, which has also become an indispensable tool for many users. Of course, if you have a lot of photos you will have to start scratching your pocket, because the free options are limited. Currently, Dropbox offers 1 TB plus your current data for 10 euros per month or 100 euros per year.

In Google Drive you will have 15 GB of free storage , but you can also access 100 GB for 20 euros per year or 1 TB for 100 euros per year. If you already use Google regularly, this option will be great, because you won't have to go to other options.

Flickr had been a good option for photography lovers, but the constant security problems that Yahoo (its owner) has been facing make it an undesirable service nowadays. Despite that, it offers 1 TB of storage.

Album photos

5. Finally, print

Who doesn't like to reminisce about old times with a photo album lying on their lap? Those of us who are older have had the opportunity to experience that and relive it every time we go to our parents' house or to our own. But our children have everything - or almost everything - in digital format.

Preserving photos on paper is one of the safest ways to have a good backup, saving extreme circumstances, such as fire or humidity. If nothing extraordinary happens, having your photos collected in photo albums can be a great option  to preserve and classify your memories.

You don't have to do it all at once, but you can take advantage of the different services that have online offers to develop your digital photos . At Fotoprix, for example, you have the option of developing different packages of photos with a 30% discount and with different prices, depending on the quantity. You can also go to Hoffman to create complete albums. This way you can create your own montages.

Within this page you can also reveal Instagram photos in square format and adapt the format to the quality of the image . Keep in mind that depending on the mobile with which you have taken the photo, some formats will be incompatible. You can also access Photobox to choose between the different packages. And while you are there, you should know that you have the option of stamping your favorite images on other products, such as calendars, mugs or canvases.