I’m an Apple Person
The synchronization between devices and the Cloud is a lifesaver when traveling.
It’s taken a while to design a process to properly organize the photos I collect during a trip for my MusingsFromARedhead blog writing.
Even if you don’t blog, perhaps you create print photo albums or enjoy scrapbooking. Keeping track of your pictures, where and when they were taken, can be invaluable.
For having a crazy creative brain, when it comes to doing this, I think linearly and keep my trip pictures organized from the start, and for the duration, of a journey.
Our last Nikon camera was fantastic because it came with built-in GPS. It took the plunge down three flights (husband said, “Oops”) in Hawaii and had to be replaced. The new Nikon Coolpix A900 takes 20MP photos with a 35X zoom. Sadly, they removed the GPS causing you to use your smartphone. That’s fine if you are somewhere with a consistent phone signal. We hike away from cell towers and constantly had to reconnect the iPhone to the camera.
Take 2,000 pictures on a trip only to find that the location data is missing from 500 of them. Say “Ugh” out loud.
Here’s How I Organize Photos
I’m eager to hear your tips.
The recent trip west across the USA looks like this:
Albums:
In Photos you can have the same photo in as many albums as necessary. Photos in the “Drive 6 23 07” album could also include pictures taken in the Badlands. It makes finding a specific picture easy.
Photos:
This is another fine feature of the program. The overall “Photos” folder divides pictures by date and time of event.
Titles:
A brief view of adding titles pictures within the 6/23/17 album would look like this:
To those of us who grew up shooting on Kodak film and know the pain of taking rolls to a processing store and waiting impatiently to have returned, the digital world is (still) profoundly exciting. You can take pictures of such random things as the candy bar left for us at the Sioux Falls Fairfield Inn, then throw it away after deciding not to blog about it or put a fun review on TripAdvisor.
Keywords:
This is a searching and tagging feature. It’s easier than devoting an album to “flowers” or “elderly” or “veterans” because you don’t have to search for that album to add items to it. You can tag each picture with a keyword, leave them in their respective albums, and then do a search for it when you get around to writing, scrapbooking, etc. about that subject.
I’ll add an groan because I know I’ve got hundreds of pictures of the elderly from my many I-Spy shots. I’ve been bad at keywords, haven’t I?
Photos has other Features
Apple has automatic features
Places:
Videos:
Last Import:
This is a handy way to find pictures you click and drag into Photos. They pop into this folder and then you move them to the appropriate album.
Selfies:
If you ever think you aren’t taking enough shots of yourself, click here and find out you’re up to 100 … but cut yourself a break because it also stores selfies sent to you.
Panoramas:
One of my favorites to click on and salivate over the beauty of a trip.
Bursts:
Keep in mind that you can only delete pictures from bursts by right clicking, going to “Show in the moment,” and working there. Irritating that it can’t be done from the Bursts folder.
Screenshots:
This one is new to me, thanks Seester. Take a screenshot with your iPhone by pressing the on/off button at the same time as the home button. Tada, the picture shows up here.
Specific steps to Organize Photos
1. Create a folder on your Desktop with the name of the trip.
2. Critical for blogging: Name the pictures IN the Photo program in both title and description spaces.
If you export photos without naming them first, it causes problems in WordPress by uploading the pictures with the DSCN or whatever file name your device uses. You need this information for SEO.
3. Mark the Favorites heart in the lower left hand corner.
This puts them all in the Favorites folder on the left (only shows up when you have tagged photos), making it easy for you to pull pictures from various places and yet export them all for use in one blog or book.
4. If you are cropping, do it in Photos!
Cropping must be done before re-sizing the pixels to retain the integrity of the pictures.
5. Export the pictures to a folder on desktop
Must EXPORT—do not click and drag.
When exporting, they will retain the titles and descriptions.
6. Re-size pixels using Preview. *
For blogging, get the size under 100kb. It will keep your overall site size smaller.
You can choose to size pictures based on if they contain a great deal of artistic detail, are landscapes, food, or simple, such as signage.
7. Again for WordPress users, you’ll save yourself grief by uploading them to a blog, not just adding them to the media library.
8. Complete the remaining two fields by clicking on the picture and editing:
Alt-field should include extra information a search engine uses, such as the city, country—something specific to that picture.
The caption will depend on how you are situating the picture in the blog.
9. Once the pictures are within a blog, if your SEO (All in One SEO, for example) allows it, add Twitter hashtags & descriptive title.
Phew, You’ve organized your photos!
You’re good to go.
Oh wait, you’d better get the blog written to go along with it…
* Interested to hear what you know about the difference between pixel resizing & optimizing!
Hi Rose. I am an Apple girl thru and thru. I love how the iCloud uploads pics from my camera automatically to my desktop. I ran into one snag, and am wondering if you have ever encountered this situation? I was using “Notes” to jot down notes about a museum I recently visited. It gave me the option to take pics while within Notes and so I did. But those pics did not transfer into my Photos file. Nor do they appear in the Notes files. Perhaps there was an extra step to saving pics taken in Notes that I was unaware of. But I seem to have lost those pics. Otherwise, I LOVE the features in iPhoto.
I ran out of storage on my cloud FOREVER ago. Apple keeps bugging me to up my storage but I’ve resisted. But maybe this incentive to do it. I used to always use stock photos but recently I’ve done a couple of blogs where I’ve taken my own pics. I just import the pics, but maybe having them in the cloud would be easier.
I was so content with the free icloud storage … sigh. Then I went over the allowance–that $10/month is my incentive to get the darned things under control!
You always have very good pictures on your blogs.
What an excellent way to ensure you have access to your photographs- in date order.
I save my photographs to the i-cloud and Flickr. Initially I created folders in Flickr but have not done so for the past year or so therefore photographs are floating. I take so many it is unreal!
Er, Phoenicia, I have almost 33K pictures in my icloud account. Do you think I need to spend some ugly winter days cleaning that out? Oh yes!
In the digital world, it is very easy to take, and end up keeping, an abundance of pictures–that’s good and bad!
My husband uses Apple phone and I have seen the picture quality. They are good and sometimes better than a DSLR. And I love the pictures that are taken with the panoramic view. It feels nice to cover such a wide area in a single shot.
Moumita, I agree that the phone picture quality is great–it sure competes with our camera.
Your post has arrived just at the right time for me. I’m currently organising my pictures. At least I know where to start. Apple is great for organising pictures. Thanks for sharing.
Fantastic, Bola. Shoot me a note and let me know what works/doesn’t work for you. Two brains are always better than one!