Organizing Digital Photos?

When your phone runs out of storage space for photos, you upload them to the cloud or save to your computer. What about after that? Do you organize the hundreds of photos we end up taking with our phones? Use an organizing software? Which one?

Or maybe an informal system you cobbled together yourself?
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We have all the photos saved in folders with dates and some description of the occasions like "At home", "5th birthday", "Niagara Falls" and so on. Sometimes, I created "albums" to put on FB. But mostly, the photos sit in folders on the computer and get backed up regularly. Only about 10-15% must be worth viewing again.

I researched organizing software options and found that Adobe Bridge is a good one and is free. It allows labeling, organizing, rating, keywords for the photos. Like a file explorer and file manager put together.
How To Use Adobe Bridge To Manage And Organize Your Images

But haven't yet started the organizing. The enormity of the project is mind boggling if I am to organize photos from all our phones. And not even thinking about the videos.

 

One thing for sure is that such organization projects take time. Lots of time and patience. A few things can help to streamline the process:
1. Separate the photos from the videos. Organize one of these at a time.

2. Have all the photos in one place. If they are not already so, first move them to one place on the computer or online.

3. Decide what you want the organized version of the photos to look like. The simplest end product can be a set of good pictures per year, separated by months or events. Label them as MM/YYYY or event name -MM/YYYY.

4. Make the organized versions easily viewable. As this project can take months, viewing each week or month's progress or sharing it with interested people can keep the momentum going.

5. Decide on the storage and backup plan of the organized versions before you start the project.

6. Install the Adobe Bridge software. Read this guide: How To Use Adobe Bridge To Manage And Organize Your Images
Based on reading, I found these features the most useful:
The "Review Mode"

The Review Mode in Bridge lets us sort through an entire range or series of images. This makes it easy to separate the keepers from the "others". Review Mode lets us quickly cycle through image after image, keeping only the ones we like and dropping the rest!
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Rating the Images and Filtering by the Rating

To make it easy to separate good images from bad, Bridge lets us apply ratings to our images. It uses a popular one-to-five-star rating system. Choose No Rating to clear the previous rating from the image. For images you know you don't want to keep, choose Reject.​

There are many other organizing features in the software such as color coding and key words. The "preview" feature also seems useful in that it is easy to adjust the size of the thumbnails. Further, when you click on a thumbnail, a preview appears in the same panel. So, I guess we can preview pictures without each being opened to a full size image. The size of the preview is also adjustable.

I will most likely use only the "Review" feature:

Review Mode displays your images as a rotating carousel. You can rotate from one image to the next using the left and right arrows in the bottom left corner of the screen. You can also press the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. When you come to an image you don't want to keep, press the down arrow in the bottom left of the screen (or the down arrow key on your keyboard). This will drop the image from the selection and move on to the next image. When you're done reviewing your images, click the "X" in the bottom right corner or the Esc key on your keyboard. This will close Review Mode. Back in the Content panel, only the images you didn't drop during the review process will be selected.​

Review, Copy, Repeat.

Will try to post an update in a few weeks.