Photo download organising tip

A very simple thing is saving me lots of frustration. It's one of those "why didn't I think of this sooner" things....

When I (and perhaps you) download pix from camera or phone, the "natural" way they are organised is by date taken, oldest to most recent ... so you have to scroll down to the bottom to find the photos you took only yesterday.

It's so much easier when the most recent photos are at the top of the screen.

At the top left of the screen is an icon called "Change your view" - click on the arrow to get options -

Near the bottom of the list is "Details" and it's here that you can re-order the way you see your files -

Clicking on the column heading changes the "Date Picture Taken" column to show the most recent photos first -

Change the view back to "Large icons" so as to actually see what the photo is. (Take a moment to delete the duplicates!)

Now the latest photos are shown at the top, saving you the effort of having to scroll down. OK, that scrolling only takes a little time, perhaps less than changing the view - but this new way of looking at the files has a knock-on effect -- to the other folders in which you have photos.

My downloaded photos are saved into monthly files, named "2014 05may", for example, so they are listed in sequence and are easy to identify. The photos within these files are listed in reverse order, so that the newest are at the top - and that means that the photos downloaded today are most easily accessible. (The rest are out of sight, off the screen, not cluttering my field of vision - that helps!)

"Image Size" is found under Image in the Photoshop menu

My downloaded photos arrive on the computer at 180 pixels/inch resolution - rather useless, as it's neither 72 pixels/inch to use on screen, nor 300 pixels/inch to use for printing. It's a camera default, and I have a workaround, a little routine for preparing the photos for use on screen -- open, crop, deal with colour balance, save for web.

The "organisational" part of that routine has taken care of itself, now that I have a monthly file for the on-screen photos ... and that's the "why didn't I think of this earlier" part of this story. Previously, the selected, edited, resized photos went into the main folder, and once I'd used them they went into "archive" folders - sometimes....

Not the best way to keep on top of things

Sometimes that step was forgotten, making for a clumsy, inert backlog, some of which hadn't been used on the blog but had been sent in emails. (What a mess; I've not yet steeled myself to deal with it.)

So much better - monthly folder with most recent photos at the top! 

In their monthly folders, current photos at the top, the older ones can simply be disregarded. How simple, how obvious, is that? ... once you think of it.