After a decade of teaching travel photography in Valencia and Cuba, I am writing here some of my knowledge and suggestions for travellers and interested photographers.
In this case the article is about how to organise, store and save the photos you have taken on your holiday.
How can I organize my vacation photos?
There are several tips that will help you better organize your vacation photos and these are:
Suggested list to save your images after the holidays
✅ Back up all your photos.
This is the first thing to do before we start organizing our photos, because in case they are accidentally deleted we can recover the data.Â
The ideal is to save everything on an external hard drive, prices for these range from $70 for a two terabyte portable hard drive to a hundred dollars for an expandable RAID system.
The latter is a redundant set of independent disks, where a large number of hard disks act as a large flash drive. Best of all, this drive can not only expand as your photo collection grows, but can be configured for dual-automatic backups. This is to make your data more secure, should the drive ever fail.
That said, you also have the option of using numerous online backup services, with which you can keep an additional backup of your files. For example, we have SkyDrive, Dropbox and GoogleDrive.
A good idea is to have our images in three different places, which, although it may seem exaggerated is the safest. Remember that one method alone is not safe, so it is best not to risk it and keep your vacation photos well protected.
✅ Choosing software to organize your photos
Another good tip for organizing your vacation photos is to choose good organization software. There are a wide variety of options for organizing your photos such as:
1 - Photos (Apple): this is an option for Apple fans, and is already a program that comes installed on Apple devices.
2 - Google Photos: this is the most recommended and used option, being completely free and offering unlimited storage. It is a software with several functions to organize photos and then be able to find them intuitively.
3 - Adobe Bridge: this software is intended for people who use Photoshop and want to organize their vacation photos. Here you will be able to organize photos easily using keywords and tags. It is a very complete and functional option, so it is an option widely used by professional photographers.
4 - Lightroom: this is not only a photo editing software, but also allows you to organize your photos. In general it offers many possibilities to organize photos, but you have to study a little how it works.
✅ Focus on the most recent photos
One thing we must do to organize photos, is to forget the old ones and focus on the new ones. So we recommend you not to mix the old photos of your vacations with the new ones. Remember that the faster you delete the bad photos, the more time you will have in the future and the more efficient you will be in organizing your photos.
Ideally, you should delete photos that are out of focus, poorly composed or that you simply don't like, while they are still on your camera or smartphone.Â
On the other hand, when you have imported your photos, delete additional images that do not meet your standards.
✅ Name your albums or folder
The next step is to name your albums or folders, this you should do while consolidating your images. So go ahead and create some albums or folders to qualify them. A good idea is to name them according to the event or occasion, although you can also do it by the year and add the event.
The reason for doing this is that when you rate the folders with names they will automatically appear in chronological order, as long as the year comes first.
✅ Name your images
Just as you should name your folders and albums, it is also recommended to name your photos, as it makes them easier to find later. A good alternative for the name is to put the year, then the month and finally the date. This way when sorted by name, these files will be sorted chronologically.
In case you don't want to place it this way, you can use the year at the beginning of your file names.
✅ Add photos to favorites
Another good tip for organizing your vacation photos is to add stars to your favorite photos. If you upload your vacation photos to a photo and file hosting service, you are always offered the possibility to mark your favorite images. This way, when it comes time to share them or browse through them, it will be easier for you.
✅ Tag your photos
In case you have put six-digit date codes in the file names or keywords to name them, that will be enough to find the photo you want. However, if you take a lot of photos, a good idea is to put a good label on them.
Remember that tags make searches much easier, as they are different from file names, which have to be unique to the same folder. It is important to note that tags should be simple and intuitive, and you can apply several tags to a single vacation photo.
✅ Organize the photos in "My Pictures".
On the other hand, if you already have images in the "My Pictures" folder or some other folder, try to organize it while organizing vacation photos. Although it's something that can take time, it's worth it, as you'll get everything organized. In addition, you can get out of the bad habit of saving everything at once and having everything in a mess.
