Organise Your Photo Clutter
We
take photos from different devices: phones, tablets, point and shoots and
digital SLRs. As your photo library grows, it gets harder to manage.
You
need to keep them sorted for easy access but more importantly, keep these
memories safe.
Storage
You
can save all photos from multiple devices at one single location cloud
storage. Both Dropbox and Google Photos offer automatic backup of photos to
your account. This way, whenever you are connected to a WiFi network, photos
can automatically sync and upload to cloud storage. This works great with
smartphones and tablets. For photos from your camera, you can just copy them to
the photos folder on your computer and have them synced across devices
automatically (using the desktop apps). Other cloud storage services you can
consider are Microsoft OneDrive, Box and Mega all of them can be accessed on
any browser and they have dedicated apps for smartphones and tablets too.
How
to `De-Clutter'
The
first thing we suggest is to copy all your photographs into a single folder on
your computer. You can make sub-folders for each set of photos (be sure to name
those folders well) so that you can easily find a photo from an event, holiday
or occasion. Once you have done this, we recommend taking a backup of all your
photos on an external drive before going processing further.
Name
your Photos properly
By
default, each device assigns a name to your photo. It could be a string of
letters and numbers like DCIM123, IMG123 or simply a date and time stamp. This
makes it difficult to store all photos together and remember which photo is
from where. The solution is to properly name your photos. Use tools like
Advanced Renamer for Windows (http:www.advancedrenamer.com) or Name Changer for
MAC (http:mrrsoftware.com). These allow for bulk renaming of photos in a folder
with a prefix of your choice. For instance, you can rename a bunch of photos to
`GoaDecember-2014-1' to `Goa-December-2014-49'
Remove
Duplicates When you leave photos on your memory card and keep taking more
photos, you can have multiple photos that up unnecessary storage space. To get
rid of duplicate photos in Windows, get the Free duplicate photo finder from
http:freepicturesolutions.com.
MAC
users can get the Photos Duplicate Cleaner from the MAC app store. Both of them
scan through your computer to find duplicate photos and show a preview of the
duplicate and the original so that you can select which ones to remove.
Use a
Photo Manager
Once
you're done with renaming and consolidating photos, we recommend getting a
photo manager software for automatic sorting. Picasa for Windows is recommended
for Windows. On a MAC, the built in iPhoto works best. Both will import your
photos and then give you option to sort them according to different criteria.
Websites
for Easy Photo Storage
Flickr
Flickr
offers more free space a huge terabyte for your photos! It syncs seamlessly
with Adobe photo editing applications. What's more, Flickr automatically sorts
your photographs once you upload them, they can be sorted via date, making
them easier to find later.
Picasa
Picasa
lets you organise photos into multiple albums and you can then sort your photos
on the basis of date or filename. You can even drag and drop thumbnails for
customized sorting if needed It works with a majority of photo formats and you
can choose who gets to see your albums.
Manage
Large Photo Libraries
Particularly
on Android phones, a large image library can get difficult to manage. Some of
the problems that you may face include a long time taken to start up, problems
displaying image thumbnails and mixed up albums. One of the easiest ways to fix
this is to clean up the phone by moving everything to a computer. But if you
can't do that, try an alternative image gallery app like QuickPic (developed by
Cheetah Mobile). It's faster, lighter and offers more functionality as compared
to the standard gallery app. There are a bunch of useful features built in,
including support for multiple cloud storage solutions (Picasa, Google Drive,
Flickr, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, 500px and more), automatic grouping of images,
image editing and playback of GIFs. The best part is that they also have their
own image backup solution and the app doesn't need any extra permissions.
Viewing
& Editing Photo Information
Any
photograph you capture with your smartphone camera or still camera has a lot of
information embedded in it. You won't be able to see this by just opening the
image you need to check the image properties. Some of the information
embedded using the Exif format includes date taken, camera model, exposure and
ISO details, lens focal length, title, subject, author, image
dimensionsresolution and so on. If you just want to view this information and
are not sure about checking image properties on your computer, you can even do
this online.Head to http:regex.infoexif.cgi and upload your image (or paste the
image URL in case the image is hosted online).
There
are some situations when you want to edit this Exif information. For example,
you might want to add your name as the author, mention a copyright, alter the
date (if your camera date settings were wrong) or add GPSlocation information
if it was incorrect or missing. There are a bunch of free tools that you can
download to do this. For Windows, try Geosetter (http:www.geosetter.deen)and
for Mac, try ExifEditor from the Mac App Store. The popular IrfanView image
viewer doesn't support all this functionality by default, but if you already
have it, you can install add-ons to enable these features
http:regex.infoexif.cgi
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Karan
Bajaj TNN
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