How to organise your photos in Windows?

It is high time you organize those hundreds of photos languishing in every possible folder in your computer. They not only make your system messy unorganized, but also make searching for a picture a very tiresome process.

If you are using Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows XP, or the older versions of this popular operating system, then here’s how you can start organizing your photos.

1. The first rule of easy organization of photos on your computer or laptop is to delete all the poor and duplicate photos. They eat up extra space and are useless anyway, so do away with them.

2. With Windows comes its Picture Library, which is a built-in viewing tool. When Windows 7 imports your digital camera’s photos, it automatically loads them into the Pictures Library and gives you the freedom of organising them in any manner you want.

3. Get some good photo editing cum organizing tool like Picasa, Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom, which not only allows you to sort photos sensibly, but edit it on the go. These programs save the enhanced photos in a different version rather than overwriting the original.

4. Metadata is information held about a photo, such as the type of camera used, the exposure time and any tags associated with it. Tags are searchable keywords that can help you group together similar images. Click on a photo in Explorer to see its tags at the bottom of the window.

5. One tedious way of arranging photos is in folders which have a decent description of what it contains. For instance, your family vacation photos can be organized in a folder called “Family Hawaii Trip June 2012”, which covers all that you need to know while searching for a photo.   Other ways of organizing photos is by sorting them according to Events, Places, People or Month/Year. And make a backup of all these folders on an external HDD.