Smartphones, digital cameras, e-mail or messaging attachments, social media, external hard drives – with digital media, the flood of images is also increasing, and a growing number of them are slumbering in some folder or other. Taking photos has never been so easy. However, if you are honest with yourself: The majority of the treasured pictures in your collection probably fall under the category: “Is this art or can it go away?” That’s why you should take a critical look at your collected works and get rid of superfluous data garbage . First of all: With what feels like millions of photos, you need time above all. We will show you how to get rid of the picture chaos and how to permanently structure your photo archive.
Since digital cameras have existed, we have all been photographers. Every moment can now be documented with a photo. This is basically a positive development. However, most of the time we no longer take the time to consciously look at the photos. With most digitally shot memories, it’s not even worth it because the picture was only taken for a specific purpose anyway. Think of photos of menus, bus timetables or other visual notes. You can confidently move these digital masterpieces straight to the recycle bin.
Put all photos in one place to sort them
Your first task is simple: Look through all digital media for images. Then decide on a storage location; move all your photos there. A central location saves you from having to search across multiple media. The easiest way is actually to sort photos on the computer.
Many cloud providers compete for customers. You often get free storage space in the cloud with your smartphone. A storage location in the cloud is therefore ideal. This allows you to access your photo collection from anywhere. This is very practical, but also unsafe. With most providers, it often remains unclear what happens to the digital images on the cloud servers. If you have children and are careful not to share photos of your offspring on social media, the cloud solution may not be an option for you.
That’s why it’s best to collect your photos on a sufficiently large external hard drive. 1 terabyte is perfectly sufficient as memory. In this size you have to invest about 40 euros, but you have a safe storage solution for your digital pictures.
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Create a meaningful folder structure
You can then do all the work conveniently on the computer. The images can be sorted better there. You can also easily set up a meaningful folder structure there. Before you start creating folders, delete all duplicate images. When images from different media come together in one location, the likelihood of duplicates is very high.
Luckily there is software for that. So you don’t have to manually search for duplicate images. For example, Microsoft offers a free app for the PC. That Duplicates cleaner program reliably finds all duplicate files. Just one click and you’ve already disposed of a lot of photos.
Depending on the size of your picture collection, create folders with year numbers in your central storage location. Then move your images to the appropriate year folder. So you have at least a rough filtering. In the annual folders you then create additional folders for finer sorting. The following categories might be useful:
- Profession,
- birthdays,
- Wedding,
- concerts,
- funny,
- Months,
- Persons,
- School,
- New Year’s Eve,
- cities,
- Animals,
- Vacations,
- Christmas.
This list is for inspiration only. Of course, you can expand and adapt the subfolders as you wish.
Sorting photos also requires critical sorting
After the duplicates have already been sorted out with the help of an app, the actual work begins. Unfortunately, no app can do the sorting out of images for you. You alone decide which pictures your heart is attached to. When moving the images into the previously created folders, pay particular attention to the following things:
- bad motive,
- nonsensical pictures,
- blurred pictures,
- too light or too dark.
With this method, you are probably parting with another large batch of images.
Now you only have the pictures in your folders that you associate with in some way. However, there are probably motifs that you can part with without any problems. Just ask yourself critically whether you really need to have thousands of pictures of your children from the baby days. A few photos are probably enough, where the quality and the motif stand out.
In a similar way, you can also look through holiday photos or pictures of various birthdays. Really only keep the strongest subjects or the images that still appeal to you emotionally when you look at them. A little tip: you only delete pictures. The memories will stay with you forever.
Also interesting: How to take good and natural portrait photos
Sorting aids via app?
There are countless apps for computers and smartphones to organize your own photo collection. The pre-installed photo app for the iPhone or Android smartphone already comes with some useful filters. Just try out whether you can use it to structure your images in a meaningful way.
However, don’t expect miracles. You won’t be spared sorting out anyway if you want to get your picture collection under control again. And to be honest: Apps often only create additional work. Especially with free apps, you still have to iron out gross sorting errors by hand afterwards. Then you drive much faster with the manual method described above. When it comes to paid programs, it has stood out for years Lightroom by Adobe out of here. With such professional photo software, you can tag images and sort them accordingly.
Lightroom also comes with an AI-supported filter function. For example, face recognition works extremely reliably – very helpful if you want to sort pictures by people. Even minor image errors disappear with just a few clicks. Of course, everything has its price, so it is probably more suitable for ambitious photo enthusiasts and less for private photo collections.
Develop a routine for sorting photos
If you’ve already made all the effort to slim down your image collection, you shouldn’t fall back into old patterns afterwards. So here are a few more tips so that you don’t sink into a flood of images again:
- View new images regularly and sort them out immediately, for example weekly, monthly or quarterly.
- Before you press the shutter button, think about whether you will still enjoy the subject, the moment or the event a year from now. If the answer is no, pack away the camera or smartphone and just enjoy the moment.
- Delete the famous digital notes, such as photographed menus or bus timetables, immediately when they are no longer needed.
- Don’t even download the funny pictures that others send you via WhatsApp and Co. This is how WhatsApp works: Select three dots -> Settings -> Chats -> Turn off media visibility.