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Digital image cleaner7/14/2023 When I’m applying basic edits to a large batch of photos, I like to keep it simple. Just import your images into Lightroom and you’re good to go. My software of choice for this task is Adobe Lightroom Classic, which offers a great interface, a wealth of editing tools, and non-destructive editing so that any changes you make can be easily reversed at a later date. Now that your photos are all neatly sorted and you’ve chucked the duplicates and the duds, it’s time to give the photos themselves a new shine. This also makes it easier to back up your photos since you’re now dealing with a very small volume of images that are actually worth saving. Blurred? Poorly composed? Chuck it where you don’t have to look at it.ĭoing this will make it so much easier to find an image you’re looking for from your small selection of your best shots. Near-identical duplicates? Pick the best and stuff the rest in your digital junk drawer. I don’t like deleting images once I’ve pulled them off my camera, which is why I recommend instead sticking them out of the way in their own little quarantine zone. You can do this when you’re sorting your photos or at a later date, but it’s a good idea to de-clutter your collection by creating a trash folder in which to dump inferior images. However, I’ve found that this is time well spent myself, and I wish I’d been doing it this way since I received my first digital camera. The downside is that this method does take a large commitment of time if you have many thousands of unsorted photos. It’s a good idea to use keywords in titling folders that will make them easy to search for. With this method, it’s then quick and easy to search for both photos from specific events and for images of certain subjects. I also create folders for specific events and trips such as birthday parties, hiking trips, and vacations. For example, I like to take photos of my cats, so most months I’ll have a folder labeled “cats” in which I’ll put all my photos of cats taken that month. For each month, I then create specific folders for photos based on a variety of factors. Instead, what I do is create a folder for a year, with a folder for each month inside that folder. Labeling folders in mm/dd/yyyy format becomes redundant. Even if you did, often the date and time are recorded in the metadata of each photo, so it’s easy to search for them anyway. Chances are, you aren’t going to remember the exact date you snapped a particular image. While you can automate the process of sorting your images or simply place them in folders marked with the date they were captured, I prefer a more hand-crafted approach. Keep in mind that if you upgrade to a new high-resolution camera, the rate at which the drive fills up will probably increase. Look at how many photos you take per year on average and how much space they take up, and then plan accordingly. If you’re investing in a new storage device, it’s important to make sure you have enough space for your existing library of photos plus extra for years to come. You could also invest in a hard drive array for truly vast amounts of external storage or a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that allows you to access your data without a direct, wired connection. An external SSD is much more expensive for the same amount of storage capacity as a hard drive, but they are much, much faster. The best external hard drives are cheap, effective solutions for storing a lot of data, but they’re relatively slow. An external storage solution is more secure and can be easily shared between different devices. You could keep them on an internal hard drive or SSD, but there’s more that can go wrong with a laptop, desktop, or mobile device, and it’s not always easy to recover your photos if something goes wrong. I recommend an external drive, whether a hard drive, solid-state drive, or a larger drive array. Wherever your photos are, your first step should be figuring out where they should be.
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