Sorting out a photo library that got away from you

Almost nobody organises a photo collection deliberately. It accumulates across phones, laptops, memory cards and half finished attempts at sorting, and by the time you look properly it is too big to face. The way through it is to do the steps in an order where nothing can go wrong, rather than starting with the deleting.

Before anything else

Copy the whole mess somewhere safe first, exactly as it is. An external drive, untouched, that you do not work on. Every step below is reversible if you have that, and none of them are if you do not.

This is worth doing even though it feels like it defeats the purpose of tidying up. You can delete the safety copy when you are finished and happy. Deleting it is a five second job in three weeks time. Recovering photos you removed by accident is not a job at all, because you cannot.

Step one: bring everything together

Do not sort yet. Just get every photo into one place, in whatever chaotic state it arrives.

Make a single folder called something like Inbox and copy into it from every source: old laptops, phone backup folders, memory cards, that external drive in the drawer, the desktop, Downloads, and the assorted folders named after holidays. Copy rather than move, so nothing disappears from where it was.

You will end up with a folder that is genuinely alarming, and possibly duplicated many times over. That is expected and it is the correct state at this point. You cannot organise a collection you cannot see all of.

Step two: remove the exact duplicates

Copying from six sources produces a great many identical files. These are the safest thing to remove, because an exact duplicate is genuinely worthless.

The important detail is what counts as identical. A duplicate finder that compares file names will make mistakes in both directions, because phones reuse names constantly and the same photo often gets renamed on its travels. What you want is a tool that compares the contents of the files, so two files are only duplicates when they are byte for byte the same picture.

Run that first and let it clear the easy wins. On a collection assembled from several sources it commonly removes a third of the files without a single judgement call.

Near duplicates are a separate job and a harder one. Burst shots, the same scene taken four times, a photo and its slightly edited version. Leave those for later, and never let a tool decide them automatically.

Step three: fix the dates before you sort by them

This is the step that people skip and then regret, because everything afterwards depends on it.

A photo carries two different dates. Inside the file, the camera records when the picture was taken. On the disk, Windows records when the file was created or last changed. These are usually different, and copying files around updates the second one while leaving the first alone.

The consequence is that a folder sorted by file date will show holiday photos from 2011 as if they were taken last Tuesday, because that is when you copied them off the old drive. Sorting by the camera's own date is the only version that reflects reality.

Any decent photo tool can read the camera date and either rename files or set the file date to match. Doing that once, at this point, makes every later step work properly. Some photos will have no camera date at all, usually scans, screenshots and things saved from the web. Put those aside in their own folder rather than letting them scatter randomly through your timeline.

Step four: a structure that survives

Use dates, not subjects.

Subject folders feel more natural and they always break down. A photo of your sister at a wedding on holiday belongs in three folders at once, so you either duplicate it or make an arbitrary choice you will not remember. Ten years later nobody can find anything.

Dates never have that problem, because every photo has exactly one. The structure that works is a folder per year, and inside it a folder per month:

Photos / 2024 / 2024-06 /

Including the year inside the month folder name looks redundant but pays off constantly, because those folders keep their meaning if they are ever moved or listed on their own. Add a short description where it helps, such as 2024-06 Cornwall, but keep the date at the front so sorting stays correct.

If you want to find things by subject, that is what tags, albums and face grouping are for, and they can point at photos wherever they live. The folders are for storage. The tags are for finding.

Step five: cull, but not too hard

Now you can delete with some confidence. Work through a month at a time rather than trying to do the whole collection in one sitting.

Delete freely: accidental shots of the floor and the inside of a bag, screenshots you no longer need, photos of documents and receipts long since dealt with, obvious blurred failures, and eight of the nine burst frames of the same moment.

Keep even when it seems unnecessary: anything with a person in it, particularly anyone no longer around, and anything showing an ordinary room, street or car. Technically poor photos of people become the ones people care about, and pictures of everyday surroundings become interesting purely by getting old. Almost nobody regrets keeping these. A fair number of people regret the opposite.

Videos deserve a separate pass. They take up far more space than photos, so a short sort through the long ones frees more room than deleting thousands of images.

Keeping it tidy afterwards

The habit is small: when photos come off a phone or a camera, put them straight into the right year and month folder rather than into a temporary one. It takes a few seconds and it is the entire reason collections descend into chaos in the first place.

Two things worth switching on. Have your phone upload automatically to somewhere you actually check, so there is no backlog building up on a device you might drop. And keep the screenshots folder separate from the camera folder, because screenshots outnumber photographs surprisingly quickly and they age much less well.

Do not try to do this in one weekend. Getting everything into one place, removing exact duplicates and fixing the dates is a genuine afternoon's work and it delivers most of the benefit. The culling can happen a month at a time, whenever you feel like it, and it is considerably more enjoyable once the collection is in order.