Many people are struggling with organising their holiday pictures, family photos, summer photos,… in a clear way. If you use software like Picasa or Apple’s Photos tool, your pictures can be sorted automatically by date, location,… But this is only in the tool itself. If you decide to use another software or just use finder / explorer it’s difficult to find the picture you are looking for.

The most clear way of organising your pictures in folders is using this folder structure:
year => date (Y-m-d) – title – location => list of pictures

For example:

• 2015
  • 2015-04-17 Birthday Koen – Alken
  • 2015-08-12 Summer holiday – Spain, Tossa
• 2016
  • 2016-12-25 Christmas – Hasselt

This way you can find quickly the desired folder and picture. Don’t forget to set dates with year-month-day (months with leading zero), this will sort your folders always in the right sequence. If you format them by day-month-year, a regular alphabetic sort won’t sort them clear because months will be mixed.

Every year I also add one folder ‘Others’ to the list. A lot of mobile pictures, selfies,… aren’t always related to an event where I need a separated folder for. So I combine those pictures into the others folder. (tip: name them with the timestamp so they are sorted from old to new) => Most mobile device name the files automatically with date & timestamp information so you just have to move them to the ‘others’ folder.

If you use a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive, you will be able to find your pictures very quick on your smartphone or other devices where the folders are synced to.

Tip: enable the Dropbox Camera Upload and move the pictures on your desktop to the right folder to keep a nice overview of your photos.