How can I organise all my digital photos?

I have photos all over the place: PC, Android tablet, mobile phone etc. I would like to get them all under one roof. What is the simplest, most efficient way of doing this? I have heard of Google+, Picasa, Media Monkey, Flickr … Tom

As you have a PC, that’s the obvious place to store them. Of course, as they are irreplaceable, you will need to store them in more than one place, and the more places the better.

Getting them all under one roof – or into one file directory – is relatively simple, once you have decided how to organise that directory. The final decision depends partly on what sort of photo collection you have. If you specialise in photographing a limited range of topics, you might want to organise them by subject. But the best option for most people is to store them by the date on which they were taken.

Storing by date

In fact, your digital camera may already do this for you. My Canon G15, for example, adds the month to the folder number: 123__09, 124__10 and so on. If you’re a pro and take tons of photos, you might have a different folder for each day. Most people should have one folder per month (2014-03 etc). It’s reasonable to have from 50 to 250 photos in each folder, but 500 to 1,000 is too many.

Your PC can sort photos by the date they were taken, because the date is recorded in Exif (Exchangeable image file format) tags inside the image.

You can make this information visible in Windows Explorer. To do this, right-click on the folder name and select Properties. Go to the Customize tab where it asks: “What kind of folder do you want?” Choose “Pictures” from the drop-down menu and make it apply to all the subfolders. After that, right-click in the Windows Explorer menu bar (eg next to Name) and add the columns you want. The options include 35mm focal length, camera maker and model, lens maker and model, light source, subject, and many more.

Happily, there are free programs that will do the sorting and filing for you. For example, PhotoMove 2 will “automatically move photos to directories or folders based on [the Exif] date taken”, while the Pro version will also find duplicates, among other things. DIM (Digital Image Mover) is a less sophisticated alternative.

Renaming and de-duping

The second big decision is whether to rename your photos. Since yours come from diverse sources, they will have different file names starting with DSC (Nikon), IMG (Canon), SAM (Samsung) or whatever. Some people like to rename them all to a standard format that starts with a reverse date and a keyword. For example, you could rename DSCN0101 to 20080830-London-DSCN0101. That way, all the files will sort easily. You wouldn’t want to rename hundreds by hand, but some photo management programs provide a renaming option when you import photos. If not, you can use a bulk file renamer.

Once you have all your photos in a single directory structure, you can go through them and delete the ones you don’t want. You can also use a program to find any duplicates. There are many options. I use DoubleKiller, which matches checksums and sizes. There’s also VisiPics, a clever program that will find duplicates that have different resolutions, or file formats, or are just slightly different pictures.

Backups

At this point, you should take a backup. Today, a 3TB external hard drive such as a WD Elements is the most economical way to back up a PC. A smaller drive would probably do. If you shoot compressed jpg images, you’re unlikely to have more than 100-200GB.

You could also back them up to a cloud service. Again, there are plenty of options, but it’s worth testing them with a dozen pics to see how well they work. They must keep the whole photo, without reducing it to a smaller size for online display, and ideally keep the original file name.

Following the sad demise of Everpix, the ones worth trying include Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Yahoo’s Flickr. I like Dropbox, but it’s too expensive for large-scale storage. OneDrive is much cheaper, a tad slower, and generally reliable, though I’ve had photos that didn’t upload completely from phones. (I’ve also used Copy but I’m not fond of the interface and found uploads somewhat slow.)

Flickr is by far the best value as it gives you a terabyte of free space. Against that, Flickr is not as easy to use, it stores things by upload date, and I fear for people who are not very careful with the privacy settings. But Flickr does work well with the Adobe Lightroom photo management program, which will keep a Flickr album synchronised with a Lightroom album.

Bear in mind that online services can lose your data, be plundered (like Apple’s iCloud), go bust or close down, as happened with Streamload, Kodak Gallery, Nirvanix, Snapjoy and Everpix. Sites can also ban you for no obvious reason, in which case you will lose access to your account. You must have a local backup.

Note: I’ve discounted any photo editing, sharing and display features as they are irrelevant to backups. However, Dropbox, OneDrive and Flickr are all pretty good for sharing photos, as is Google+.

Organising albums

Your database of photos should now remain essentially unchanged, but you may want to edit and view photos, organise them into albums, rate them, add captions and so on -- without moving the originals. All this involves the use of metadata, most of which could be “owned” by your photo management program. If so, all your work is locked in, unless there’s a way to export it and then import it into a different program.

Again, there are plenty of photo organisers, so you could try a few and see which you like. The obvious ones are the Windows Live Photo Gallery for Windows users, iPhoto for Mac users, and Picasa for Google fans. Alternatives include Zoner Photo Studio Free, highly recommended by Gizmo’s, and XnView.

For serious photographers and professionals, Adobe Lightroom 5 is unrivalled, and by Adobe standards, very reasonably priced at £99.99. (It’s not worth saving a few quid on Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 at £76.99.) One of its most useful features is that you can apply a set of corrections to fine-tune a particular image and then apply the same corrections to a whole batch. It also provides “unlimited undo”, even after you have saved a file and closed the program. The drawback is that you lose your albums / thematic collections etc if you stop using Lightroom, but really, as with Photoshop, Lightroom is forever.

More metadata

Earlier, I mentioned the invisible Exif metadata that digital cameras add to pictures. There’s another important open standard, IPTC/XMP (International Press Telecommunications Council/Extensible Metadata Platform), which is supported by Adobe (its developer) and Microsoft. This allows other kinds of metadata to be stored, including Title, Author, Copyright and so on. It means you can add labels and captions that survive with the photo even if you stop using that photo management program. This is another plus for Lightroom.

Programs that support IPTC/XMP include Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, XnView, Irfanview, Zoner Photo Studio, Picasa and BreezeBrowser Pro. Vista and Windows 7 also support it, though some of the fields use non-standard labels. See Labelling Digital Photos for more information.

If you use IPTC/XMP, be wary of non-compliant programs, as these may not preserve data they know nothing about.