How to organize your digital photos

This product image provided by Google shows a feature of the Google Photos mobile app that allows users to search for photos by people or places. (Google via AP)

Not so long ago, a kid could grow up and have only a handful of photos of his entire childhood. These days, it’s not hard to take hundreds of photos of a child in a single day.

While it’s great that photography is so much simpler these days, there’s still the bother of figuring out what to do with all those shots.

Backing up the photos you really want to keep is essential. In fact, today is World Backup Day, a day we’re reminded that 133 cellphones are lost or stolen every minute around the world, and one in 10 computers is infected with a virus every month, so back up those files you don't want to lose.

If you're overwhelmed with too many digital memories, here are some options for organizing photos in a way that works.

Folders and hard drives

Since the advent of digital photography, organizing photos has meant creating folders on your computer, moving pics into the folders, and then backing it all up onto external hard drives, CDs or memory sticks.

Most of that still works (although CDs are a little harder to find now) and these backups are probably a still a good idea. But all that file creation and management takes a bit of discipline to do it regularly. Which is why so many photographers are welcoming cloud storage.

Cloud storage

Photos uploaded to the myriad of cloud services that have opened up in recent years including iCloud, Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr, Amazon Cloud Drive are much less likely to be lost in a computer crash or a damaged memory card.

And now, some of these systems are even organizing photos automatically.

Google Photos was only launched as itsown entity one year ago, but in that time, has emerged as one of the best photo systems out there. For one, it offers unlimited storage -- which is huge for those who take a lot of pics or worry about hitting their storage ceilings.

It also offers a frighteningly accurate photo search system using image recognition technology. Type in “beer” for example, and it will find all your shots that contain beer bottles or pint glasses -- whether you named those photos “beer” or not. It even “learns” the names of your friends and family, pulling up all images of your sister just by typing in her name.

The search function is so good that it could make that tedious job of naming and adding keyword tags to your images obsolete. The system isn’t perfect and it’s had its share of problems, but it’s almost certain to improve over the next couple of years.

Yahoo’s Flickr, one of the first sites for organizing, storing and sharing photos, is still a good option, even as it loses users to Instagram and Google Photos. But it’s still the site many pros use, in part because it displays handy camera specs on each shot, including shutter speed, focal length and camera model.

The site offers 1,000 GB or one terabyte of free storage, and encourages users to create albums and add keyword tags to each shot to make it easier for both you and others to find your best pics.

Last year, Flickr introduced a “Magic” image recognition function similar to that used by Google Photos, as well as auto-tagging. With the auto-tagging, when the technology recognizes shapes commonly found in cars, it will label the image “car” and when it finds shapes it thinks are mountains, it will label the image “mountain.” Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s a timesaver for many photographers.

The iCloud Photo Library for Apple iOS devices is similar to other cloud networks but goes the extra step of automatically storing original high-resolution photos and videos in iCloud, while leaving a  “lightweight” version behind, to save space on your device. iCloud offers only 5GB of storage for free; after that, storage plans start at $1.29 per month.

Everyday organizing

As great as cloud-based online drives are, they don’t solve all photo organizing problems; you’re still going to have to regularly purge photos or risk getting overwhelmed.

The best way to manage all your images is to make a point to regularly clear out your phone or your camera’s memory card once a week or month, depending how often you use it. That means toss the terrible shots and dump the duplicates. It also means purging all those shots that are just okay, but that you really don’t expect to treasure years from now.

Make it a habit to do this regularly when killing time while waiting in line, for example; instead of checking email, delete some blurry selfies.

Then, set yourself a rule to name and file your photos into folders every time you upload shots to your computer or external drive -- again, purging the bad ones as you go. Same goes for when someone emails you a photo worth keeping -- download it right away into a folder rather than let it sit in your inbox where you can’t find it again.

Taking a few moments for these steps now will save you a ton of time later, when you search for favourite shots later.