In a previous post, I discussed how the Recurrer app helps you stick at long-term projects that require you to repeat similar mini-tasks over and over again. One of the examples I gave in that post was tidying your photo collection.

Let’s go into the step-by-step process of tidying a photo collection. You can work your way through your collection in whatever quantity and with whatever regularity suits your purposes. But it’s perhaps most satisfying to set a long-term goal and work out what you need to do to achieve that goal.

For example, say you have 5000 photos in your collection and you want to have them all tidied and organised within a year. Then you need to organise (5000/365) = roughly 15 photos a day. However, don’t forget that you’ll also be taking new photos in that time period. Let’s say you take 2 new photos per day on average. That bumps the total to tidying roughly 17 photos a day to bring your photo collection under control.

Let’s allow some flexibility in your schedule and say we’re going to organise 35 photos every 2 days. (In the Recurrer app, you’d create a task ‘Organise 35 photos’ and have it recur every 1-3 days).

How do you organise your photos? Here’s my process, using websites and apps that are available either for free or via the Setapp suite of apps for Mac OSX. You can obviously substitute in your preferred software as needed.

1. Look at the dimensions of the photos – if any are too small (ie less than 1000 pixels on any one side) then I upscale them using the upscaler tool at https://icons8.com/upscaler.
2. Import the photos into PhotoLemur and allow it to work its magic. In 95% of cases, the PhotoLemurised images are a noticeable improvement in quality.
3. Upload the photos to croppola.com and crop them to a standard size. Ideally, use the Croppola AI to find a balanced crop for your photos, but if it doesn’t crop them in a place that you like the look of, it’s easy enough to manually override.
4. Compress the photos using Squash. There’s no need to waste unnecessary space on your hard drives.
5. Use MetaImage to fix any metadata on the photos. Usually, I fix the dates to be the actual date/time on which the photo was taken, since all the modifications in the previous steps can mess that up. I also add a location to the photo. (Tip: you can copy and paste any necessary metadata from the original photos’ metadata into your edited photos.)
6. (Optional) Tag the photos with any other relevant information you want to keep. I don’t do this but I know some people swear by the tagging.
7. Finally, upload the photos to Google Photos for online storage and access (also – face detection!), before backing up the photos to an external hard drive for safe keeping.

And that’s it. Repeat that enough times and you’ll eventually have an organised photo collection, accessible whenever you need it.

Of course, once your photos are organised, you switch the Recurrer task to recur less often (maybe once a week or so?) just to maintain any new photos that you’ve taken.