The process of organizing pictures is a time-consuming, but crucial task. Keeping your images organized and backed up will save you a lot of time and headache in the future. Therefore, it is essential that you do it properly early on and keep a consistent system in place. Photographs are our precious memories frozen in time, and we simply cannot afford to lose them. In this article, I will provide detailed information on how you can organize your digital photographs on your computer and implement simple backup practices.
Whether you take pictures with your smartphone or a dedicated camera, you have most likely accumulated thousands of images over the years. Those images are probably scattered all over the place – some on your phone, others on your computer. And if you previously ran out of storage, you might have dumped some onto an external drive as well.
But what if you were able to put them all in a single location, properly organize them in an easy to remember manner, then store them in a safe and reliable location? It sounds like a hard job, but it is extremely simple and effective, as you will see below.
Please note that this is NOT a guide for serious photographers with large image catalogs. If you are a photographer looking for ways to organize your photo library, please see my article on “organizing pictures in Lightroom” instead.
Before we go through a detailed, step-by-step process of organizing your photos, below is a quick “TLDR” version.
The Best Way to Organize Photos
- Find All Printed Photos. If you have printed images, find every single one that you want to preserve and digitize. Go through all prints and family albums. Considering reaching out to other family members to locate more photographs.
- Digitize Printed Photos. Once you locate all the photos, use a good-quality scanner to scan the photos in high resolution.
- Locate Digital Photos. Go through every device, starting from your smartphone all the way to external drives to locate every digital photograph you have.
- Use a Single Storage Device. No matter how many photos you have, it is best that you put them all in a single storage device. If your current storage device has insufficient storage, buy an external hard drive with enough capacity to fir your entire photo library.
- Use a Solid Folder Structure. Once you put all the photos in a single location, come up with an easy-to-remember folder structure that you can use consistently for all your photos today and in the future. I recommend splitting your photos into folders organized by year and event name.
- Organize All Photos. After you decide on the folder structure, go through all the images that you previously scanned, as well as your digital photos, then organize them. This is going to be the most time-consuming process.
- Backup Your Photos. Now that you have all the photos properly organized by folders, it is time to back them up. Use several local storage locations to back up your photos. Also, consider using online cloud storage to store another backup.
Now that we went through the quick summary, you might want to read the full version of the article below.
Table of Contents
1) Locate All of Your Photographs
Start with your computer and try to locate every single picture. Common places to look for photographs are in your “My Documents” or “My Pictures” folders, but you might have pictures in other folders as well. Just search your computer for all files with “JPG” extension and see what it finds. Create a local folder on your desktop and move all your pictures there. If you have other computers/laptops at home, perform the same search and try to find every single picture. Next, go through your mobile devices (iPhone, iPod, Zune, etc) and see if you have any pictures stored there too. Copy them all to your main PC, into the same folder that you created earlier.
Now it is time to look for your pictures on the Internet. Log into your email account and search for all emails with image attachments. Extract whatever you can find and save them to the same location. Next, go to all social media sites that you participate in (Facebook, My Space, Twitter, etc) and look for other pictures there. You might find your pictures in your friends’ albums too. Request your friends to send the high-resolution versions of the photos to you. Try to remember if any of your friends took your photos on their cameras and if they did, give them a call or email them and request them to send the high-resolution versions of your photographs. Save all new photos to the same temporary folder that you created on your desktop.
2) Storage and Backup
Before thinking about how to organize your images, think about where you will be storing your images and how you will be backing them up.
2.1) Where to Store Your Photos
Some people like to store pictures on external drives and other storage media, but I store all of my photographs in my computer’s second internal drive (the first one is for the operating system). Internal hard drives are very inexpensive nowadays and you can buy a very large drive of 1 Terabytes or more for less than $100. If you have a laptop, it is probably better to store your pictures on an external drive instead, because the internal drives on laptops are typically small and slow. If you have a small number of pictures (less than 1,000), you can easily store them on your computer’s main drive. On the other hand, if you have a large collection of photos, then I would recommend to put them on a separate hard drive.
2.2) Where to Backup Your Photos
No matter where you store your pictures, the first thing you need to think about is how you will be backing up your images. NEVER fully rely on a single storage space, whether a hard drive, a CD/DVD or a memory stick. All electronic equipment fails at some point of time and leaving your precious data in one place is like putting all of your eggs in one basket. So, no matter where you decide to store your pictures, decide where you will be backing them up at the same time. Do NOT make the mistake of backing up your data into the same medium. The backup must be on a different physical device, otherwise, it is not a real backup.
For backup purposes, I use a dedicated external drive that has exactly the same folder structure as my internal drive – it is basically a “Mirror” of my internal drive.
3) Create Main Folder Structure
Now that you know where to store your images and backups, it is time to think about your folder structure strategy, i.e. how you will be storing your pictures. There are many ways to do this and everyone can give different suggestions. Let me show you the way I do it and I will leave it up to you to decide if it works for you or not. I first start with the root folder and create a folder called “Pictures”:
As you can see, I have another folder for “Videos” as well :)
Next, I create folders for each year, one by one:
4) Create One Folder Per Event and Move Photos
Then under each folder, I create one folder per event:
Examples of events are: “Mom’s Birthday Party”, “Christmas Celebration”, etc. – whatever fits the description of an event. If you have one large event that has smaller sub-events, then create one main folder and smaller subfolders underneath. For example, if you have something like “California Vacation”, it could have several subfolders inside such as “Disneyland”, “Universal Studios”, etc. Go ahead and create events for one year based on what you have.
I used to store each folder name by “Date Event”, such as “01-01-2007 Aspen”, but I chose to abandon this idea because I now use dates on my pictures instead:
Now upload your photos into appropriate folders. This is the hard part, because you will have to go through all of your photos one by one and sort them through. Just looking at the picture by itself is not easy, as you might not remember when it was taken and where. What I suggest, is looking at the information that is stored inside the picture. Almost every digital camera today stores vital information such as Camera Type, Date and Time right into the picture when it saves it. This information is called “EXIF” and you can read my article “What is EXIF” to find out more about EXIF and how you can read this data from each picture. Anyway, on most modern operating systems such as Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can easily access this information by simply right-clicking the image, clicking “Properties”, then clicking on the “Details” tab:
Look at the “Origin->Date” field for the date when the picture was taken. Other information such as “Camera” might be useful to determine who took the picture (whether it was your camera or somebody else’s). Move all of your photos into appropriate event folders and make sure that nothing is left in your original temporary folder that you created in your desktop.
5) Rename Your Photographs
Unfortunately, many cameras produce images with weird filenames like “DSC1005.JPG” that do not make any sense. I highly recommend to rename all of your images to make it easier for you to locate them by searching for the file names in the future. Again, you can do this in many different ways, but I will show you the easiest method.
Go to one of the folders that contains your pictures. It is a good idea to start with a small folder, so pick one with only a few pictures. First, sort all your images by date by clicking the “Date” column (you should be in a “Detail” view for this to work). Then select all pictures by clicking on the first one and then pressing CTRL+A (select all):
Then right-click on the first image and click “Rename”:
Then type the date, dash, event name and press “Enter” (for example: “20070101-Local Park”). I prefer to use the year first, then month, then day; because if your files are somehow mixed up in one folder, it will be easier to differentiate them by year, then month then day. If you start with a month, it will all get mixed up, because the months are repeated every year:
You should now see that all your files got properly renamed. The system will automatically add a number in brackets at the end of the file, which represents the file sequence number:
Do not worry if something got messed up. You can go back to what it was by simply by going to “Edit”->”Undo Rename” or hitting “CTRL+Z”. You can also rename the files multiple times, if needed. Repeat this process as many times as you have folders and make sure that everything is properly renamed.
6) Backup Your Photos
Now that you have everything organized and renamed, it is now time to back up your data. Since you are just storing bare files, there is no need for some special backup program. All you need to do is to copy your files from the current location to a different one. Just go back to your main folder, select your “Photos” folder, right click on it, select “Copy”, then go to your destination drive’s main folder, right click on an empty area and select “Paste”. This should start the process of copying pictures from one hard drive to another.
6.1) Backup Frequency
How often should you be backing up? I suggest backing up every time you add more photographs or when you work on your pictures. I personally try to do it every time I upload new photos from my camera and I highly recommend that you do the same. Unfortunately, most people do not recognize the value of backups until their equipment fails. I once lost two weeks of my photography just because I forgot to backup my photos! Lesson learned, now I try to backup as often as I can and I store my images in four different locations – I do not want to ever lose my data again.
Hope this helps.
it’s not easy:(.
I have already spent about 5-7 hours to sort them out. Deleted thousands of photos. Created dozens of folders. Still plenty to do.
Some file names are crazy, like: Uzb2006 (1400)….1401…
:)
Shams, don’t rush yet, I’m almost finishing up my next article on how to organize photos in Lightroom. I highly recommend doing it in Lightroom instead, especially if you have a large number of photos.
Where may I find the article “How to Organize Photos in Lightroom?”
Thank you.
Jules, the link is provided on the top of the article. If you cannot find it, here it is:
photographylife.com/how-t…-lightroom
I am about to embark on deleting photos and reorganizing, with the system of years, dates and subjects described above. How do I do a simple search in Windows 10 to find a particular picture once this is completed?
I prefer using folder names as yyyymmdd_location_event i.e. 20071125_London_River_Walk naming individual photos is far to time consuming.
Peter, you do not need to individually name each photo. You simply select all pictures (CTRL+A) then you press “F2” and rename all pictures to your liking.
Hope this helps!
This was your best advice! A simple recourse we all use for other things and forget when it comes to pictures! Great article, thanks!
Your article on organizing photos in lightroom is the best I have found. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I have a question regarding renaming existing photos. I am using a mac and it won’t allow me to Ctrl+A and then change the name. I tried F2, I can’t find a rename function, and I have tried double clicking on it. Any suggestions?
Hilton, you are most welcome! Try going to the Library module, then select images with your keyboard/mouse, then go to Library -> Rename Photos to rename all images.
Hope this helps.
Nasim!
Thank you VERY much for this article!
Extremely helpful!
All the best,
-j.p.
I only need a simple photo organizer and the Lightroom 3 software is too much for me. I like the process you described above. What software is that? I do have a lot of photos now being poorly organized through Picasa. Can you recommend an easy solution without using the heavy duty Lighteoom software? Thanks.
I know it’s a little late, and please don’t quote me on this, but I think he is using the File Explorer from a windows operating system.
Just found this article on organizing photos and it was extremely helpful and easy to follow. Now my photos are properly characterized and renamed. Thank you so very much for the helpful tips!
Nasim,
Great work putting everything together in one neat article. Most of the steps you present here I have already done myself, however, there was one I never even heard of or thought about trying. That select-all and rename thingy… so much win! This is the first photography blog in MONTHS that’s actually interesting enough to follow!
All the best,
Yannis
042341AUG2013
Sorry for the length of this posting, automated software recommendations to solve the problem of using multiple digital cameras but keeping files in FILE NAME and CHRONOLOGICAL order are listed at the end….
I have been shooting photos since about 1976. In addition to shooting with DSLR’s starting with digital Point and Shoot cameras in about 2001, I still shoot, develop, and print B&W film up to 4×5 inches, making prints up to 16×20 inches in my traditional wet darkroom.
I cannot believe that just this week I found a solution for this digital photo file naming problem (found it on Google Play by accident of all places) considering all the photo web-sites I visit daily like DPReview, APUG (Analogue Photo User Group), Ken Rockwell, Thom Hogan; the photo magazines I subscribe to, and the technology web-sites like Cnet.com I routinely visit, and have never seen this discussed.
Perhaps photographers are aware of the solution because they use different software. I do not use Adobe’s Light Room or similar Software as when I tried it several years ago, after having started a similar sub-directory by DATE/SUBJECT many years ago and already had thousands of images, I did not like what I called the “virtual cataloging” concept. I prefer the physical organizing of my files, and I had too many images to start over. I have been using ThumbsPlus by Cerious Software for over 10 years to manage my digital photo collection.
I too started using the sub-directory structure you outlined back in the DOS days for data files, and kept using it for digital photos. However, when shooting with multiple DLSRs at an event (one with a wide-zoom, the other with a tele-zoom)and sometimes a Smartphone, I would make a DATE SUBJECT sub-directory, then below that one. create a sub-directory for each of the three cameras. If I put the photos into one sub-directory they would be out of NAME sequence as each camera is “counting” its own photos, thus not being in numerical order when placed together. If sorted by FILE DATE they would be in order for awhile…but after editing them, the new FILE DATES would get them out of order also.
I am good with computers (learned to program with DB-II before using a Word Processor) and cameras, and I cannot believe that I just found solutions this week to keep photos in FILE NAME ORDER though Batch Editing Software and APPs for my Android Smartphone (actually discovered the solution first on GOOGLE Play when searching for Batch File Naming) which automatically renames the files (BEFORE EDITING PHOTOS!!! very important) to the EXIF DATE TAKEN (using a format you select) and adds a Suffix you create such as “NikonD700 cKnapp”, giving me files named “YYYY-MO-DAY HR.MIN.SEC NikonD700 cKnapp.jpg”. After editing a photo I use a technique I have used for years, in that when saving the edited photo I added a “C-nn” to indicate Change, and a brief description of the software used to edit the photo and the effect/edit applied. Now I will add a “c” after the SEC and the software/effect/edit used (in case I want to duplicate the effect later) after the suffix like this:
Original after automatic Batch Renaming to EXIF DATE TAKEN
2013–08-04 19.43.42 Nikon D700 cKnapp.jpg
After Editing
2013-08-04 19.43.42c Nikon D700 cKnapp.jpg SageLight HDR Clahe Surreal.jpg
Regardless of which File Browser, Image Manager, Photo Viewer used on PC or Android, my photos will be in File Name AND Chronological order simultaneously (by date taken, not edited) just by sorting by FILE NAME!!!!
I am not going back to rename all my old digital photos as I would lose the part of the file name that contains the information regarding which editor/effect/corrections were used, as well as other things like the name of locations/people/category etc., that I included in those older file names. I am using this method, starting this week for all new digital photos.
For Android try PHORGANIZER to automatically Batch Rename photos to their EXIF DATE TAKEN (allows you to add a unique Suffix), there is a free version and a Paid Version, worth the money! Neither AppBrain Ad Detector nor WakeLock Detector reported any nefarious activity from the APP PHORGANIZER.
For the PC there are some pricey ones out there but I found NAMEXIF for free, to automatically Batch Rename photos to their EXIF DATE TAKEN (allows you to add a unique Suffix), and Kaspersky Anti-Virus did not detect anything nefarious. NAMEXIF does accept donations, I made one of course.
For those times the EXIF DATA is lost or destroyed as happens when using some photo editing APPs for Android (which I notice happens less with PC software), there is an ANDROID APP named EXIF TAG EDITOR which lets you copy the EXIF DATA from the Original File and paste it into the edited photo so you have the DATE TAKEN recorded in the file. For the PC I found that ThumbsPlus by Cerious Software (which I have used for about 10 years, current version is v9) allows you to edit the EXIF DATA manually, there is probably other software out there that does this as well.
I hope this information is of use to someone.
Craig Knapp
Age 51
[email protected]
Hey,
Thanks for the tip but I don’t have an option to rename files when I have selected them all and clicked right button :( Could you help please, I use Mac.
Thanks,
Gosia
you can look for batch file rename tools – either in Apple’s own app store, or else, just google for ‘ batch rename ‘. For mac OSX There’s also graphicconverter you can use quickly rename all photo file names.
Backup prices have dropped enormously. You can now have a 1TB backup in the cloud (which means multiple backup drives) with services of Dropbox.com, Box.Net, apple’s iCloud (50GB), and Amazon S3. It might be worth checking these out as well, since you always have an extra backup then.
Regarding organization, when an event includes both video and photos files, what is the best organizational structure? I considered putting both in the same event folder, but perhaps if I were to use Lightroom to catalog both type of assets, it will not matter about the physical storage location. I would appreciate any suggestions and thoughts on this topic.
You can use sourceforge.net/proje…organizer/ , which does all the work for you (you can name each picture and folder with date parameters: “%Y_%m_%d ({old})” would be translated to “year_month_day (old_filename)”)
I’ve seen other guides suggest organizing folders as [Year > Month > Day] or just [Year > Month], but I like your idea of [Year > Event] much better. It’s more intuitively descriptive and doesn’t split related photos across multiple days, yet it doesn’t leave me with ever-multiplying folders in the root of my Pictures folder. Thanks for the idea!
Nice article. Thanks for the great information!
Should you have a separate folder for family pics?
Nashim, your article is very helpful.
Can you recommend a method or a program with which I can “tag” a picture to enable searching. e.g. On 2015 March 5, I have taken a picture with my family in Switzerland with great sceneries. I wouldn’t want to physically make four folders, “2015 March”, “Places”, “Family”, “Sceneries” and then make four copies of the same picture. It’d be good if I can apply 4 tags/labels to that one picture and then be able to search it later on.
Please help me. I’m a photographer and trying to get these images in order. I had an editor edit 1100 but didn’t get the additional 300 images and now when I put those in there they got to the bottom. I tried putting them in “order taken,” “order created,” and nothing is working. I’ve tried everything and going nuts because I have to get these to my client in order. Help me pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeee. :(
Great article Nasim! And I appreciate all the tips from other photographer’s too. I have ton’s of photos, both personal and those that ive talen of other’s. One huge problem I have is “Good-Intentions” and its nasty brother “Procrastination”. And to make matters even worse, their cousins, ” Chronic Anxiety and Depression” and ADD” are always lurking right behind me to sabotage my excitement and flow! I always want every photo perfect, and some in different styles of edit. I find myself taking way too much time with this and eventually start feeling pressure and guilt for taking so long. Most of my pics never make it to the intended… :'( This hurts a lot to admit, but I have to assume that Iam among friends here and that aome may be able to identify with me. I am eventually so embarrassed that i just crawl under my rock and hope I dont see them because i am so ashamed. The pics that i actuality finish usuall come out great. But most of the time i don’t see them as WORTHY OF BEING SELLABLE ” until months or many, MANY months have passed. I hate anyone to be mad at me and the thought of it sometimes seems to paralyze me and keeps me from my SUCCESS! I hope i don’t get crushed by the harsh critics that may read this. (I cry much too easy)
What I AM looking for is some that can offer “understanding and advise” . Especially if they have “BEEN-THERE-DONE-THAT” AND OVER-COME!!!
This post took off to the South and is not what i expected to wright and i hope it won’t be used against me in the Profesional Photog World. Like don’t blast me on social media in a way that would hurt my future.
FIGURES!!!! I finely take a chance and open up and after rereading I see that I probably put that post out of place… I wish I could take it off of here!!! Is there an option for that??? …and that was supposed to be WRITE, not WRIGHT up there!
Thanks for this post,
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Omg this is so helpful. I am somewhat between OCD and normal people. A lazy perfectionist (haha) and been lookin on the internet about idea on how to organize my photos (not the APP to organize it). And your article gave me inspiration. Thanks!
I’m inspired! Thanks for the easy to understand article!
“Krojamsoft BatchRename” Tool is a powerful tool, that allows you to quickly rename all the files in a specified directory. You can remove spaces, replace spaces with underscore, uppercase/lowercase filename, add a prefix/suffix, remove/replace strings and also catalog files by adding an incremental number to the file name.
Thank you for your post. I was overwhelmed with photos, so this is extremely helpful!
Each folder of my Nikon camera is limited to 9,999 images. To avoid duplicating the filename(s) by using the default setting when I reach image 10, 000 or greater (requiring a new folder) or change to a new Nikon camera (as I have done twice) I name my files as yPN_xxxx where y represents the folder number, PN represents my initials, and xxxx represents the image number within a folder. Organization (and photo workflow) starts with the process of naming the image in the first place. This is not my idea; I read it somewhere. But it seems to make sense — whatever software is being used for transfer, storage or post-processing.
Thank you very much for this very well explained article. Lot to do but now you have given me the lead I feel it “might”, be a bit more straight forward.
Could I ask if you might recommend a simple straight forward program for photo organisation. Not really into all the touching up etc. I used to use Picasa which, as you will know, Google has now “Killed off”. I don’t really want the new Google setup. To be honest, I don’t trust google I believe they collect all data they can, I try to do everything to avoid them Reading, copying and using my data.
Thanks for the article
Just found this site and have to say I have been missing out.
My question is
Do you keep your edited shots away from the main image, in say an edited folder
In addition, versioning is essential. Without version control we might have a chance to publish the wrong image. Version control can prevent lots of potentially costly mistakes.
I must admit that I am guilty of not renaming pictures, I have however found a way around it by creating folders. I used to that just on my computer but since I discover DBGallery, I have always resorted to using them. It is quite easy. After signing up on their website, you can create different folders for different events and upload pictures to those folders. You can visit them on DBGallery.com to learn more.
In the age of technology, electronic storage has become just as much of a dilemma as physical storage. We take our family pictures using our digital cameras, download the pics to our computers.
Unlike prints or negatives, digital images can be lost forever in a catastrophic hard drive failure, or even accidentally deleted with a few clicks of the mouse. Keeping
I just installed Photoshop Elements 2020, hoping to stop using Picasa. What are thoughts about PSE 2020 for photo organizing? I have years worth of photos “somewhere” – various devices. Many thanks!
Very Confused. I sync to Google Drive etc. and if you do what you suggest and break how it is organised on Google photos when you sync you will get duplicates. Should you not.
1. Leave in one folder with no subfolders
2. Export to your owner hierarchy once in Lightroom once edited >
The above will allow you sync to google etc as and when and bring in new ?
This was very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks a ton! Really helpful.