Organise photos in a snap!

If your photos pile up, keeping track of them becomes a huge task. We have some tips about how to keep your cherished moments sorted.

Digital photography enables photographers to take as many pictures as they wish in each project. Whether it is a travel or a commercial shoot, photographers end up with a great number of photos by the end of every project. Organising these pictures often gets difficult and challenging. If you procrastinate, photos tend to pile up and then it is a black hole from that point!

Lenscraft did a deep dive into backing up your cherished memories. In this instalment, we will tell you how best you can organise your pictures so that it can be a breeze to retrieve them.

* Find a system: The easiest way to organise pictures is by date. Create a folder for your daily shoot under year followed by month and day. For daily photographers, this is the most simple way to store and organise. For intermediate photographers, the pictures can be arranged by year followed by the name of the project. For example, 2023 (year)-May (month)-Paris Trip (project name). Furthermore, you can have a separate folder for edited and unedited pictures too.

* Handpick the best, delete the rest: As mentioned earlier, photographers take a lot of pictures on a DSLR and fill up a couple of memory cards on each project. Some images will be blurry while others will be out of focus or images that just cannot be used. Carefully review your pictures, choose the sharpest images and delete the rest. You can keep images shot from different angles or experiments, but most definitely you will not need those unintentionally overexposed images!

* Don’t procrastinate, organise now: Strictly sort out and organise pictures after every shoot especially if you shoot regularly. It makes things easy and avoids the great pile-up! Systematically arranging the pictures after each project must become a part of your routine. This goes a long way in helping you back up your work as well. Pro Tip: Set a reminder each month to organise and backup.

* Software: Adobe offers software like Lightroom and Bridge. ACDSee and FastStone are other options. Add keywords and tags to the photos with the help of such software for retrieving them in the future. Apple Photos and Google Photos use machine learning functions, which recognise content in the photos and help you find specific ones. For example, if you search for dogs or flowers, the software will go through the gallery to identify the subject or objects. Photographers even use Excel sheets or the Notion platform to create a directory to keep track of their work. This includes dates, keywords, project type, the folder name and hard drives, camera gear used, etc. Alternatively, Google Photos is a great option to organise photos on mobile phones.

In the course of organising photos, reviewing also helps you critique your own work by identifying the mistakes made, and the angles or settings that worked to make the picture perfect. It can spark new ideas too. Apart from finding your old projects instantly, organising helps you look back at your work and provides you with a bird’s eye view of the progress you have made in your photography journey.

Lenscraft is a monthly column on all things photography — tips, tricks and everything in between.

The writer is a photojournalist who tells stories with his pictures. Find his pictures on Twitter and Instagram @pushkarv