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From NPR. Hey everybody, it's MaryL.
I keep getting these alerts that I'm about to run out of storage in the cloud where I backup my photos and videos.
I could pay to get more storage, and honestly that's what I've been doing because the alternative just seems daunting.
I got to sit down, look through all these photos, delete the duplicates, figure out which ones I want to keep.
When I might have like five versions of the same group shot, you know, I look best in this one, but my friend looks best in this one.
Also, I don't want to get sucked in emotionally and end up on a trip down memory lane when I see people in photos who I don't talk to anymore.
It just feels like the Wild West, right?
Who knows what I'll encounter?
If you're like me, Elise Hugh is here to help.
She did this episode for LifeKit on how to make your photo collections more manageable.
And turns out it doesn't have to...
...generations. That's if we can find them.
Organizing your photos takes a lot of time and commitment, and it's something that you can't procrastinate.
You actually have to do it.
That's Kim Camando, Consumer Tech expert and National Talk Show host.
Next year, you're just going to have more photos, so just bite the bullet and get it done now.
That's the first takeaway, look it.
When you see a lot of photos that look the same, Kim says start culling those down.
So we want to pick maybe not the best five.
If you can really do it, you start picking the best two.
Some software programs do this task for you.
Pros like a program called Photosweeper.
Kim recommends Photos Duplicate Cleaner on a Mac or Duplicate Cleaner on PCs.
The programs group DOOPS, so you can only keep the ones you need.
Now, if you really don't want to do any of this, of course you can always get on to Fiber.com and say, I want somebody to organize all of my photos.
Glad you brought that up, Kim.
There are professional photo organizers out there like Anna Carvajal.
The Photos app that comes with Macs lets you add keywords too.
Windows similarly lets you add tags to your photos, and Google Photos also allows manual tags.
It is painfully boring and it takes a long time, but it is absolutely worth it.
So my advice is not to overwhelm yourself with a huge number of tags.
So for example, my personal library is about 100,000 photographs, but I only have about 20 keywords.
So don't get too specific.
So my keyword for our travels is vacation.
That's it. I don't say Italy.
I don't say, I don't know, Colombia.
That's not what I do. It's travel.
Because I also know the dates of those travels.
Now since she's organized by date already, she can go to 2016, then click the travel tag and all the travels of that year would come up.
You know, whatever system you have, whatever works with you, just pick a software that can keyword or tag.
But the thing is to actually do it and maintain it.
By the end of the year, you should have your photographs tagged for the current year.
That means that when Christmas comes along, you can have your calendars made, your personalized gifts.
Really easy. If taking on a big tagging project in his photos, most of our phones have software that recognizes faces and places and common visuals like a hug really well these days.
Something really wild has happened in the last five years.
And she learning and all this stuff is now so good at getting better every year that you could actually just use search alone to go back and look at some of your photos.
So your fifth takeaway is to lean into machine learning and search functions to fill the gaps in your organization.
Naveen gives an example of trying to find a photo of his son's stuffed animal, or a lovey as you might call it.
So I just went into my iPhone into the photos app.
I typed in toy. It should be all the toy photos I've never taken a photo of and then boom.
So I just wanted to show you how to get back up.
Whether it's our mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, friends, dogs, parties or milestones, photos, capture them all and bring us together.
So the final tip is about what all this organization is for to share the photos.
Anna Carvajal keeps an extensive archive for sure, but she also prints photos into books.
How to have a good weekend.
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To just a reminder here that signing up for life kit plus is a great way to support our show and public media and you'll get to listen to every epa's marie Schneider, Margaret Sereno and Sylvie Douglas.
Engineering support comes from David Greenberg, Ted Meabane, on Robert Rodriguez.
I'm Mary Elcigara. Thanks for listening.
On this week's episode of Wild Card, musical icon, Oni DeFranco.
I get a lot of f**king...
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