24th February 2018
Time to Sort Out Your Photos
Finally, we are getting some good rain again which is forecast to continue this weekend. If you don’t have too much planned outdoors then consider some work on your computer which may turn out to be a lot of fun. In this case I am referring to your “Pictures” folder and all the sub-folders and files it may contain.
At the shop when transferring customers data from an old PC to a new we see time and again a “Pictures” folder that often looks like the electronic version of an overflowing filing cabinet. Often there are folders with no naming convention, duplication’s and individual photos everywhere. Some folders are named by date, some are named by event and often the photos within are totally jumbled.
A rainy day is sometimes a good excuse to sort through this mess and arrange things logically and if you think about it, unless you are going to stop taking photos the situation is only going to get worse. With smart phones having such great built-in cameras the rate at which we take photos is simply accelerating every year.
As long as you know how to create new folders and rename existing ones, you should go quite well. Also being able to rename an individual photo will be an advantage. These are not hard things to do and if in doubt then please consult Mr Google and even watch a video on YouTube to see how this is done. At the end of creating or renaming some of your folders you will be able to move individual photos or groups of photos into them.
My tip before you start this process is to work out a logical naming convention that will suit you. For instance, in my “Pictures” folder I have a total of only 5 sub folders. These are named as follows – Family / Friends / Travel / Events / Yet-to-Sort. Within the Family folder I have sub folders named Xmas 2016, Xmas 2017 etc. As well as folders named Bruce 50th, Dad 80th, Mum 75th etc. Using this sort of logic, the “Travel” and “Events” folder is self-explanatory.
My “Yet-to-Sort” folder is where I dump photos from my phone when I am in too big a hurry to sort them at the time. This is because you often end up with a mix of photos on your phone that are from 2 or 3 different events before you get around to transferring them to your PC. The above folder layout has suited me well and means that I can find a photo from a particular time or event very quickly.
Once you have a logical structure to your “Pictures” folder like the above it then takes very little time to keep it organised. The other good spin off is that it also makes it easy to find and delete duplicate photos or folders which we find most people have. In fact, we have seen many instances where customers have 8 to 10 copies of photos from the same event or overseas trip that are all just taking up extra space and making a backup more difficult.
Talking of backups – remember to keep a copy of all photos on another device like an external hard drive or synchronise them to a cloud service like Dropbox. On the same note, when transferring photos from your phone to your PC, I would suggest leaving a copy on your phone until the above backup has happened and then removing them from your phone to free up space on it.
It will be easy to get side-tracked when sorting and organising your photos as you will probably even find some that you had totally forgotten about – so enjoy some reminiscing and embrace the wet weather.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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