How to Organize Your Digital Photos and Videos

Whether you are an avid photographer or simply always have a phone within arm's reach, we all start to accumulate large digital photo libraries. However, these photos are typically spread across multiple devices, including phones, computers, cameras, flash drives, hard drives, or disks. As a result, it can be difficult to find a specific photo and, in some cases, photos are lost forever due to a corrupted file or failed storage device. To ensure easy access to all your photos and prevent losing precious memories, it is beneficial to organize your photo libraries, create backups, and implement a process that keeps all your photos organized going forward.

Step 1: Consolidate All Photos

If you do not already have all your photos stored in a consolidated location, the first step is to consolidate them on a storage device, such as a solid-state drive (SSD) or hard disk drive (HDD). For smaller libraries, SSD is an affordable option. However, if your library is several terabytes (TB), then HDD is a more affordable option. Regardless of the size of your current library, ensure you plan for the future. Look at the storage space your current photos and videos require, determine the date range covered for that period, and extrapolate how much space you will need for the next 5 years or more. For example, if you have 800 gigabytes (GB) of data and that data consists of photos taken over the last 3 years, then you are generating approximately 267 GB (800 GB divided by 3 years) of photos and videos each year. As such, to ensure you have enough space for the next five years, you will want a device with a storage capacity greater than 2 TB. Having more storage space than needed is always easier than running out of space and having to purchase a new storage device and transfer all the data. Keep in mind that if you take a lot of videos, your storage will fill up much faster than photos, especially in higher resolutions like 4K and higher frame rates, which are annotated by frames per second (FPS).

Once you determine the size of the storage device you will need, think through all the places you have photos, such as old phones, thumb drives, computers, and cloud services. Once you have a list of all the storage locations, you will need to copy or move all the photos to the SSD or HDD you are utilizing. Now that they are all consolidated, you can begin organizing them.

Step 2: Ensure the Metadata is Accurate

Metadata is the information about when a photo or video was taken, such as the date, time, camera used, location, etc. This metadata is stored in an Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) file. Having the correct metadata is essential to properly sorting the photos in step 3, as the software we recommend will sort using the date contained in the EXIF file. To see if the metadata is correct for a single photo, you can right-click, select properties, and view the details tab. However, when going through an entire photo library, individually looking at each photo is not feasible. Therefore, you can view the photos in details mode, right-click the bar at the top of Windows Explorer, and add the additional data you are interested in. The dates you should focus on are the "date taken" for photos and the "media created” date for videos. Other dates will show in the metadata, such as "date modified," but these dates can change depending on whether you downloaded the photos from the cloud or copied them from another location.

If you determine some photos do not have the correct metadata, you can edit this data using ExifTool. While ExifTool can be a little daunting to use because it utilizes a command-line interface, once it is installed, you can find plenty of tutorials and example commands to accomplish almost any task you need. While the EXIF file contains a vast amount of information, focus your efforts on the "date taken" and "media created" dates. If you correct these dates and still have the time and desire to modify or correct other portions of the metadata, you can always do more, but start with the basics.

Step 3: Create a File Structure and Sort Photos

The key to organizing your digital photos is choosing a logical file structure and sticking with it. For most, a file structure based on the year and month the photo or video was taken is easy to use and maintain, especially if you choose a photo/video naming convention that incorporates the date. If you choose to organize by date, a typical structure is one folder per year (e.g. 2025) with 12 subfolders, one for each month (e.g. 2025_01 for January of 2025). It is important that the folders are named starting with the year first and using the two-digit month; this naming structure will ensure they stay in chronological order when sorted by name, which would not be the case if you name them using the full month followed by the year (e.g. January 2025).

If you choose to organize your photos by date, a great tool to streamline and expedite the process is PhotoMove. Sorting tens of thousands of photos manually is extremely time-consuming and exhausting. PhotoMove is the best tool we have found to quickly sort the photos into folders using the date contained in the metadata. While PhotoMove offers both free and paid versions, for $8.99, it is worth purchasing the paid version, as it offers additional features, such as additional output folder structures, the ability to send duplicate photos to a predefined folder, as well as move photos that are missing metadata to a predefined folder. While not necessary, these features definitely make the project of sorting your digital photos and videos easier and more convenient.

Step 4: Choose a Naming Convention and Rename Photos

While not absolutely necessary, it is also best practice to utilize a standard naming convention for your photos. Most Androids already utilize a naming convention based on year, month, and day, but iPhones and various cameras often have less informative names. Given that metadata can be altered, as you learned in step 2, utilizing the date within the photo/video name will ensure you always know when it was taken. Additionally, if you ever need to restore the metadata, you can utilize ExifTool to automatically populate the information using the date and time contained in the name. If you have an extensive photo library, renaming everything seems like a daunting task, and it would be without the proper tools. However, with “Bulk Rename Utility,” you can rename batches of files simultaneously.

Bulk Rename Utility is free to use and it will save you a substantial amount of time and heartache. It has a highly customizable set of tools that allow you to replace the entire name, add a suffix or prefix, insert text at a particular point in the file name (e.g. you can place “video” after the 10th character in the name), and rename the file based on the metadata date. Since you have already finished correcting the metadata in step 2, you can rapidly rename all your photos and videos by directing Bulk Rename Utility to utilize those dates as the file name. In this case, you would have a file name that looks similar to 20250207_061035.jpg. This date indicates the 4-digit year, 2-digit month, 2-digit day, hour, minute, and second the photo was taken. If this is the format you prefer, simply set Bulk Rename Utility to utilize this date format: %Y%m%d_%H%M%S. Additionally, a nice touch is to add a suffix at the end of the photo name to indicate a special event. For example, if the photo above was from John’s birthday party, you could add a suffix of “_birthday-John” to each one, making the name 20250207_061035_birthday-John.jpg. Avoid using spaces in your names. Rather, utilize underscores or hyphens between words, as desired.

Step 5: Back Up Your Photos and Videos

Once you have gone through all the trouble of consolidating, correcting the metadata, sorting/filing, and renaming all your photos and videos, it is essential to back up your work. This can be done simply by having a second SSD or HDD and copying all the newly sorted and renamed files to it. While this provides a backup that will protect against your primary storage device failing or becoming corrupted, if both storage devices are kept at the same physical location, you are still at risk of losing all your work from natural causes, such as a fire or flood. Cloud storage is one method of creating a backup. Alternatively, you can store the second storage device at another family member’s home. There are various systems for backing up data, which are beyond the scope of this article. The bottom line is do not have all your photos and videos only stored on one device or in one location.

Conclusion

Photos and videos contain so many memories that would be devastating to lose. Additionally, when these photos and videos are spread across numerous devices, they become difficult to access and enjoy. To alleviate both these issues, it is worth consolidating, organizing, and backing up everything. While these tasks are intimidating initially, if you utilize the recommended tools – ExifTool, PhotoMove, and Bulk Rename Utility – you can make quick work of a large library of photos. Once you organize all the years of photos and videos that have accumulated, the task of maintaining it requires minimal effort.