Are you finding it increasingly challenging to keep track of all the photos saved on your smartphone, laptop, or PC? Well, you are not the only one encountering this hassle!

 =We thrive in an age where smartphones have made it possible to take photos almost anywhere, given that these devices are easy to carry around. While this is certainly not a bad thing, organizing your photos has turned out to be a painstaking affair. The images stored on digital devices often mix up with various other pictures, such as those downloaded from the internet. This explains why you should focus on personalized photo organization. 

Why is photo organization important?

Apart from the visual appeal you enjoy when you keep your photos neatly organized, there are several other reasons underlining its value. It becomes unnecessarily difficult to find a particular photo when needed, when you fail to store them in an organized fashion. 

Moreover, organizing your photos would also help to free up space by getting rid of all the unnecessary ones. You would be far less likely to end up losing precious photos or accidentally deleting them when they are properly organized. 

How to get your photos organized?

Photo organization might seem daunting to beginners, especially when they have hundreds of photos saved over several years. It is quite natural to postpone it for later simply because it looks like organizing the photos would take too much time and effort. However, the more you wait, the pile of unorganized photos would keep growing. Here are six simple yet effective tips for beginners: 

1. Assemble the photos

You cannot organize the photos if they are spread around on multiple devices. First, you would have to transfer all your photos to a single computer. These include photos stored on your smartphone, your family members, your emails and chats, etc. You may also choose to use a cloud service to upload all the photos from different devices into the same account. This would help you organize the photos seamlessly. 

2. Delete the ones that you do not need

Now start going through all the photos one by one to seek out the ones you do not need. Quite often, we take multiple photos of the same view just to achieve the perfect angling and lighting. It is also common to take photos of things that wouldn’t really matter much later on. Keep the best photo of a view and delete the rest. You may also use one of the apps or online services that help to scan and detect all the duplicate photos. However, before you even start deleting the photos, make sure to back up all of them in a separate cloud storage option. You wouldn’t want to accidentally delete a picture that might be precious to you. 

3. Start organizing

Once all your photos are in one place and you have got rid of the ones you do not need, it is time to actually start organizing them. Start creating multiple folders as albums to categorize the photos and store them accordingly. You may do this either in a theme-based manner or in a chronological fashion. However, organizing photos based on specific events may end up in a mess if there are too many categories. An excessive number of albums would only make it confusing to browse through the photos. It is best to organize the photos chronologically and create event-based folders only for the important stuff. 

4. Edit photos

One of the advantages of photo organization is that you are likely to notice various imperfections in the photos. Often, when we click photos and they look perfect at that time. However, as we gain more experience over time, we start to notice errors in lighting, angle, etc. You may edit these photos to fix the imperfections. You might want to create a separate folder where you can move the photos that require editing. Once edited, you can move those photos to their final folder. 

5. Import photos regularly

Now that you have organized all your existing photos, just make sure that you import all your new photos to the computer on a regular basis. This would save you the trouble of having to organize hundreds of photos once again. It is generally advisable to update your main photo storage once a month to keep it quick and easy. 

6. Ensure regular backups

All it takes is a hard drive crash for a computer to lose all the photos you saved on it. This is why it is very important to keep them backed up somewhere safer. Upload all the folders into cloud storage once you have organized them. Keep updating the cloud version each time you import a new set of photos to your computer.

These tips should make it much easier to organize your photos and keep them that way. As long as you maintain them in an organized fashion, it would never feel like a chore when you need to find out a specific picture.