I’m looking at the mish mash of photos and videos mainly that are spread around various folders on my PC/external drive and wondering how on earth to get them filed and in a rough sort of system that works.

What sort of folders and subfolders do you all use for things like family pictures. photos from trips, photos of particular ones of your kids, biking and all the random stuff? Is it all in one place and backed up exactly on another drive? Do you use the ‘my pictures’, ‘my videos’ folders that window comes with as standard?

Mine has got into such a state that it’s now a gargantuan job sadly.

Picassa is good at this, it will sort by date taken or by the person in the photo using facial recognition.

Google Drive.

Keep everything locally but sync it to Google. You can then use the power of Google to search your documents – and photos.

Let Google Photo do it all for you. It organises your photos by the date on the exif data. Just let it upload your photos.

Google Photos.

Just sync it all up, and its got intelligent search.

Search your wife’s name, it’ll find her. Search for Citroen ZX and it’ll find your first car. It’ll pick out animals, holidays, it even seems to manage to find photos by location that I’m sure didn’t have geotagging enabled…perhaps it recognises the scene or something…

Does google photos only store things online, or will it arrange the folders on your drive too? I’m clueless obviously!

I think I’m looking at around 150GB.

The theory is that you no longer need folders.

In practice, I already had mine organised using a minimal tree structure. High level is Subject (Family, Biking, Walking, Paddling, Others) then a folder for each event or time period.

Google Photos is a flat structure (it doesn’t replicate your own folders) unless you go in and organise into Albums. However, you can have the same photo in multiple Albums (something you’d not want to do on your PC).

The Google search function is very powerful. For instance, you could type in the words Beach and Bike and then see all the photos you have of bikes at the beach. It can also recognise many geographical features and landmarks.

In my experience folders never work since they don’t allow a file to exist in more than one folder at the same time. For example if you had a folder called “MTB” and a folder called “Family”, where do you put a photo of your family mountain biking?

Loads of tools that handle this better and all the suggestions above are great. Personally I use Apple’s Photos app with iCloud Photo Library and tag photos (in my example above the photo would be tagged “Family” and “MTB”). The intelligent search and facial recognition aren’t as good as Google in my opinion, but I’m ensconced in the Apple ecosystem so it made more sense to me. With a 150Gb library keep an eye on cost, since some – like Apple – will charge for that size of Cloud storage.

or will it arrange the folders on your drive too?

Forget about folders; it’s not the way to catalogue photos.

Picassa is good at this

Google Picassa is no longer available for offline use 🙁 – it was indeed great

The Photo app built into Windows 10 is pretty good once you identify where all of your photos are. I tend to create a single folder on my machine and then drag all of the photos and videos from ‘My Pictures’ into there (in subfolders) so I know where it all is. ‘My Pictures’ actually links to folders all over your machine so I usually go there and drag the stuff that I want into my main folder. I can then include that folder back in ‘My Pictures’ just by right clicking on it and selecting ‘include in library ‘my pictures’

Most of the time now though I use Adobe Elements organiser as it also does a good job of searching for pictures of bicycles, horses, cars etc.

Google Picassa is no longer available for offline use

This is what makes me nervous about photo management tools. At some stage someone might pull the plug on them, leaving you with a beautifully catalogued photo library and no supported tool to maintain that library.

Yeah metadata seems to be the way to go over rigid folder structures, just dont fancy editing each and every picture so need to find a way of doing mass tagging of each folder before I fling them into a mass grave. So long as you tag your photos locally it shouldnt matter what you use to browse them as it will all be a part of the file.

Google are well known for randomly stopping services so there is no way I would trust anything online. Local copies should always be your go-to with online for backup or transit only.

If you are doing this locally then applications like Lightroom are the way to go. (I know Lightroom is also an image manipulation program but it has the required underlying library functionality)

As Scotroutes and stilltortoise say, a folder structure will only work so far and only if your photos only fall into one category per photo which is rarely the case. Photo library/database/tagging programs work by storing your photos “somewhere” but by tagging them with keywords you can filter them how you want. The only limitation is how well you tagged them in the first place. If you’ve done it right then you can simply search for “Peak, Jimbo” and you’ll get all the shots of Jimbo in the Peak no matter when you took them.

I think Adobe Elements Organiser is the same underlying software as that used by Lightroom library, it would be odd for the one company to use two different systems as they usually want to encourage people to upgrade.

You can “mass tag” in Lightroom as well as having grouping of tags so you could set up a tag – “wcd-fw” that contained “World cup”, “downhill”, “MTB”, “mountain biking”, “Fort William”, “Scotland”. Just by applying the one tag to whatever pictures you select the program will apply all the others automatically.

I use old fashioned folders. Works for me. Multiple copies is not a big issue. Only time I need this is for work images. In this case I make a small copy. As I generally need it email someone or stick in a report or tender the smaller version is actually better and I can easily find the original if needed. Never had much much with picassa and the like. Too many of my pics have the wrong time stamp which seems to mess it up.

Copy your photos off the camera each time/event that you take pictures of.

Store the images in folders named:

CCYY-MM-DD-<description of event>

for example:

2017-01-16-visit to the train museum

Once you have all your photos in a single directory with that structure underneath you can do whatever you want with it and you can always see all your photos in the folder in date/time order with a full description of the contents of the directory.