What I Use: Photo Management (Premium)

Last week, I explained how I managed my work-related documents and other files. This week, I’m thinking about something even more important: My family’s memories, in the form of the many photos and personal videos that we’ve made over the years.

As with basic file management, this process has changed with advances in technology, especially cloud-based storage services like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive/Photos. But an added wrinkle is that much of this content pre-dates this digital age, and so I had to scan and organize many paper-based photos as well.

I wrote about that process almost two years ago in my Digital Decluttering series. The short version is that, after years of on-again, off-again scanning of old photos, I decided to actually solve this problem by buying a high-speed photo scanner and getting it done. Within weeks, I had scanned in all of my old photos and had sorted, tagged, and cropped and edited, and then copied most of them—there are always stragglers—to the cloud.

And to be clear, that “sorted, tagged, and cropped and edited” bit is important and can be tedious. Newer photos, like those taken with a smartphone camera, typically include date, time, and location information. And this makes it less important to create some kind of an organizational folder system for containing them since search is so easy.

But older photos, and photos you’ve scanned, don’t have this information. And so you can try to “tag” them, by editing their metadata, or you can simply give in and create some kind of a date-based folder management system for them.

I’ve adopted a hybrid approach, so to speak. And you won’t be surprised to discover that it maps to the way I manage work-related files. That is, older photos are stored in hierarchal, data-based folders. And newer (smartphone-based) photos are simply backed up normally to the cloud—more on that in a moment—and, on occasion, dump copied to folders on my NAS that are somewhat organized.

Let’s look at that more specifically.

On my NAS, there are top-level folders for Documents, Music, Photos, and Videos (and a few others), similar to what I have in the top-level of my OneDrive storage. Under Photos, there is a folder called Photo collection. That folder includes folders for various decades—1960s through 2020s at the moment—-plus a few others.

Inside of each decades folder is, of course, a set of year folders. So the 2000s folder has folders for 2001, 2002, and so on, up to 2009.

Looking inside any one of these, you’ll see the way I used to organize photos, before smartphones. There are date-based folders for each event. For example, “2007-01-13 Pennsylvania trip,” “2007-04-06 Mark’s 9th birthday party,” and the like. (And each folder obviously contains whatever photos are related to that event.)

Move into the 2010s and things change. In 2013, I switched to using smartphone cameras exclusively, and because most of those photos contain date, time, and location information, organizing gets simpler. Plus, all of these photos are backed up to the cloud right from each phone, to both Google Photos and OneDrive. (And I pay for storage on both services, directly for Google Photos and via Microsoft 365 on OneDrive.)

But this also creates an interesting challenge for my NAS-based photo archive. Backing up smartphones to the cloud is great, but if I want those photos on the NAS too, I need to do some work. And this is further complicated, in my case, by the fact that I use 6-10 different smartphones each year because I review them.

The solution I came up with is to back them up when I stop using them: I connect a phone to the PC, copy all of its contents to a date-based folder (like “2018-10-10 iPhone XS photos”), and then move that folder into the appropriate folder (in this case “2018”) on the NAS. It’s not perfect, and I’ll sometimes remember to do additional copies (like at the end of a year) too.

Anyway, if you look at one of the newer year-based folders on the NAS, you’ll see that it’s not quite as organized as such things were years ago. But they don’t need to be, thanks to search. And this is a “just in case” third option anyway.

As for the cloud, at some point, I did copy my entire photo collection folder structure to both Google Photos and OneDrive. Google Photos doesn’t display the folders, so it’s all in there by date. Or, for those scanned photos that were not correctly tagged, by scanned date. This is not ideal, but … there’s always work to be done.

OneDrive does retail the folder structure. Because OneDrive. But that’s nice in a way, too: The Photo collection folder in Pictures on OneDrive closely mirrors the same folder on my NAS.

Photo management is never really done, especially for me since there is a mix of personal and work-related photos still mixed in there. And there are always photos that need to be correctly tagged, rotated, or otherwise edited. But just getting them organized, and stored in three different locations, is the big step. The rest will come—or not—over time.

Two additional notes.

I happen to use Google Photos and Microsoft OneDrive for photo storage in the cloud, but that’s just what I use. Amazon Photos is probably a fine choice, and you get unlimited storage with a Prime subscription. And there are other options, obviously.

And I’ve found that searching for photos is much faster, and more accurate, when I do so from the cloud as compared to the NAS. In fact, I often find exactly what I want very quickly.