Life Kit - How tech experts recommend organizing your photos

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Feeling overwhelmed by thousands of photos? Running out of storage? We spoke with a consumer tech expert, a professional photo organizer and a photo-loving tech entrepreneur to get their tried-and-true methods for sorting digital photo collections — whether you're doing simple, routine prevention of photo bloat or starting a big archiving project. This episode originally published December 31, 2020.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey everybody, it's Marielle. I keep getting these alerts that I'm about to run out of storage in the cloud where I back up my photos and videos. I could pay to get more storage, and honestly that's what I've been doing because the alternative just seems daunting. I gotta sit down, look through all these photos, delete the duplicates, figure out which ones I want to keep.

When I might have like five versions of the same group shot. You know, I look best in this one, but my friend looks best in that one. Also, I don't want to get sucked in emotionally and end up on a trip down memory lane when I see people in photos who I don't talk to anymore. It just feels like the Wild West, right? Like, who knows what I'll encounter. If you're like me, Elise Hu is here to help. She did this episode for LifeKit on how to make your photo collections more manageable. And turns out, it doesn't have to be the nightmare I'm imagining.

There are ways to automate parts of the process, to outsource if you've got a big project, and to take this one day at a time. She'll also talk about how to organize your photos so you can access the memories when you want to. There is something so powerful about an image to preserve our memories and to connect us across distance and across generations. That's if we can find them.

Organizing your photos takes a lot of time and commitment, and it's something that you can't procrastinate. You actually have to do it. That's Kim Commando, consumer tech expert and national talk show host. Next year, you're just going to have more photos. So just bite the bullet and get it done now. That's the first takeaway in digital photo organization, which is commit to starting in the first place. So you want to take a look at all of your devices. I mean, your phone, your camera, your tablet, any memory card you have laying around, and your computer, of course. The next takeaway is whittle down the rubbish, the stuff you don't

need. Remove images like receipt photos or screenshots and duplicates. When you see a lot of photos that look the same, Kim says start culling those down. So we want to pick maybe not the best five. If you can really do it, you start picking the best two. Some software programs do this task for you. Pros like a program called Photo Sweeper. Kim recommends Photos Duplicate Cleaner on a Mac or Duplicate Cleaner on PCs. The programs group dupes so you can only keep the ones you need. Now, if you really don't want to do any of this, of course, you can always get onto Fiverr.com and say, I want somebody to organize all of my photos. Glad you brought

that up, Kim. There are professional photo organizers out there, like Anna Carvajal. She's certified by an organization called the Photo Managers. I organize, I preserve, and I share. She handles big jobs, like if you have photos from your grandparents' era to scan and preserve, or a big research project involving lots of visuals, or an event where you want to display old photos, but you have to get them organized first. She takes everything from prints to negatives to slides and memorabilia. And I put them in chronological order, and then

I give them back to you in a way that you can share and preserve them for future generations. Anna offers tip number three, keep a regular photo maintenance routine. You can do it by marking favorite photos on the fly and sitting down to do monthly organization. She loves the simplicity of keeping your favorites folder up to date so you can go to it first for albums, gifts, and cards. You'll start realizing what you really love, what you really want to date, so you can go to it first for albums, gifts, and cards. You'll start realizing what you really love, what you really want to preserve, and what is really important to you. Okay, and so, and this is as simple as just marking it with a little heart or something, if we're talking about an iPhone, right? Okay. Exactly. So that's, you know, that is something

that anybody can do on the go, on the fly. And you can do your future self a favor by getting into a regular photo organizing rhythm. Anna recommends sitting down and culling those duplicates or unnecessary selfies at least once a month. I'm not the only one with failed selfies on my phone, right? Right? She cleans up by using a big monitor, or at least on her laptop. A lot of people attempt this on the phone. And on the phone, you don't really have a big screen. You can't really see more than one picture at the same time. So it's really difficult. Okay, but if you have a big project or you decide you want to get your entire photo history organized,

you should organize those big archives chronologically. If the photos are really old digital prints or film, she organizes by decade, then gets more detailed from decades to years, then years to months, then months to days. Tip number four, do the tedious work of tagging. That is writing to the, information that travels with each digital image file so that any computer can more easily search and sort going forward. Anna likes Adobe Lightroom, but the Photos app that comes with Max lets you add keywords too. Windows similarly lets you add tags to your photos, and Google Photos also allows manual tags. It is painfully boring and it takes a long time, but it is absolutely worth it. So my advice is not to overwhelm yourself with a huge number of tags. So for example,

my personal library is about 100,000 photographs, but I only have about 20 keywords. So don't get too specific. So my keyword for our travels is vacation. That's it. I don't say Italy. I don't say, I don't know, Colombia. That's not what I do. It's travel.

Because I also know the dates of those travels. Now, since she's organized by date already, she can go to 2016, then click the travel tag and all the travels of that year would come up. You know, whatever system you have, whatever works with you, just pick a software that can keyword or tag. But the thing is to actually do it and maintain it. By the end of the year, you should have your photographs tagged for the current year. That means that when Christmas comes year, you should have your photographs tagged for the current year. That means that when Christmas comes along, you can have your calendars made, your personalized gifts.

Really easy. If taking on a big tagging project and organizing by dates feels like a bridge too far, stick with the basics. Even the techiest, most detail-oriented among us, cut themselves a break. I started a service called Foursquare, which is, you know, partly about tracking all the places that you go to so that you can remember and you can say, oh, here are my five most favorite places in Paris. We originally went to tech entrepreneur Naveen Salvadurai for advice because he's so into digitally tracking and organizing his life. But he's the father of a toddler.

Oh my God, I didn't even know if I brushed my teeth this morning. There's just no time for anything. So his family keeps it simple. He relies a lot on machine learning and AI to help him identify the what's, who's, and when's in his photos. Most of our phones have software that recognizes faces and places and common visuals like a hug really well these days. Something really wild has happened in the last five years. Machine learning and all this stuff

is now so good and getting better every year that you could actually just use search alone to go back and look at some of your photos. So your fifth takeaway is to lean into machine learning and search functions to fill the gaps in your organization. Naveen gives an example of trying to find a photo of his son's stuffed animal, or a lovey, as you might call it. So I just went into my iPhone, into the photos app. I typed in toy. It showed me all the toy photos I've ever taken a photo of. And then boom, there are 10 or 12 photos of the one that I was talking about. Kim Commando, the consumer tech expert, agrees photo search and AI have taken a lot of the hard work off our hands, except in some cases. So I could essentially tag my oldest daughter, who's named Ava, just Ava, and then it can automatically sort all the photos

of Ava, right? If this is working correctly? Yes. Okay. If it is working correctly. But whenever I do that with my son, Ian, is that because we look so much alike. No way. Is that it's like, wait, that's not Ian, that's Kim. Okay, so there is the tricky problem of resemblance, but the AI is good and getting better. No matter how well you're organized, your vast visual memory collection means nothing if it's vanished. So your tip that the experts cannot stress enough, takeaway number six is backup. Backup, backup, backup. Anna, the professional

photo organizer, recommends the 3-2-1 backup standard. Which means you should have three copies on two different media and one off-site. So it sounds kind of complicated, but it's actually really easy. A cloud service counts as off-site. Kim Commando, the consumer tech expert, recommends Google Photos or Amazon Prime Backup, which comes with a Prime membership. Naveen is cool with iCloud, and Anna uses a cloud service called Backblaze. I also have my photographs in my computer and on a hard drive that my computer writes to every night. So if my computer fails, I have at home a second failsafe. And then if worse comes to worse, Backblaze will FedEx me with all my information.

A note on iCloud, Anna reminds us it's a syncing service, not a pure backup service. So whatever you do on one device, transfer to all the other devices. So if you make a mistake in one device and delete photographs and you wait for 30 days and you don't realize, those photographs are gone. Can't hurt to make sure your backups have backups. Whether that's our mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, friends, dogs, parties, or milestones, photos capture them all and bring us together. So the final tip is about what all this organization is for, to share the photos. Anna Carvajal keeps an extensive archive for sure, but she also prints photos into books and other gifts. She has a revolving photo album on an iPad in the kitchen, and she uses photos as part of family nights and gatherings.

Sometimes I do Sunday night slideshows where I pick pictures of the kids that are funny. And, you know, we sit down and we watch 50 funny pictures and stories come out. And I think that is the most important thing about archiving and sharing our memories, that you, when you share them, there's another side to that photograph that you had no idea about. And those stories come out and they enrich not only your life, but, you know, the person who's telling them. In preserving moments, you can bring the past forward. We just have to be mindful of how to manage them all. Okay, let's review. First, you may feel overwhelmed by all the photos to sort through and get organized, but you can start small. Takeaway number one is just start, says Kim Commando. This is not going to be like an overnight success, okay? It's going to take some time. It's definitely going to take some patience. Two, whittle down what you don't need. So we want to

pick maybe not the best five. If you can really do it, you start picking the best two. Three, maintain a regular photo maintenance rhythm with favoriting on the fly and monthly photo cleanup sessions. My tip though is try not to have too much wine while you're doing it because you just might be calling saying too many photos the next day. For big projects, the fourth takeaway is to organize chronologically by date, then use software to tag your photos in a classification system that's meaningful to you. Just pick a software that can keyword or tag. There's lots of them out there, but the thing is to actually do it and maintain it. And if manual tagging is

too much, your next takeaway is machine learning and image search tools are your friends. Rely on AI to help you identify the same people or scenes and then simply label. So using AI, you can say that these are certain people. So maybe this is mom, dad, your husband, your spouse, your partner. The most basic tip is tip number six, back up. Let's just make sure they're backed up somewhere and they're backed up without us having to think about it. Because if we lose our phone or we break our phone or my laptop breaks, we don't want to think about, ah, did we back up the photos? Where are those photos? Finally, organization helps you share,

and sharing photos is a powerful way to connect us to our pasts and to one another. I've done for my two daughters that are over 18, I did a zero to 18 photo books, and they just absolutely love them. You know, I feel like I'm continuing something. I think, like, I'm actually giving back. A picture says a thousand words. Now we have thousands of pictures saying millions of things. It's best if we can find them. That was journalist Elise Hu. For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. There's one about how to take more meaningful vacation photos and another on how to have a good weekend. You can find those at npr.org slash Life Kit. And if you love Life Kit and you just cannot get

enough, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash Life Kit newsletter. Just a reminder here that signing up for Life Kit Plus is a great way to support our show and public media, and you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash Life Kit. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Audrey Nguyen. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our digital editor is Malika Garib. Megan Cain is our supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, Margaret Serino, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support

comes from David Greenberg, Ted Meebane, and Robert Rodriguez. I'm Mariel Seguera. Thanks for listening.