Last post we agreed that we MUST get some organization going for all our personal photos. You’re still with me, right?
This time I’m talking about a few free photo organization programs. Your goal is to find an organization program for all the future months’ projects. This is an important month!
If you’re planning to organize all the photos from your various hard drives, phones and iPads, cameras and DVDs, you’ll want to have a program that allows you to download your photos into the program easily. The program should also allow you to organize into projects or events, tag them for easy search, and even basic editing.
Do you have a Mac? If so, you can use either of these programs I’m going to talk about! If you’re a PC user, you should consider going to a Mac [just kidding…..kind of!].
APPLE PHOTOS
iPhotos, the predecessor to Photos, was a program I used for many years and I felt like I knew it like the back of my hand. It was eventually changed to simply “Photos” but by then I had moved on to a professional organization tool, Lightroom.
Photos is a great free program that you should consider as a Mac user. Photos allows you to bring all your photos into the program and organize them easily. You may want to organize your uploads by event [Christmas 2016, Duncan’s Birthday, etc]. Or, you can organize them by date [2019-January, 2019-February, etc].
Photos allows you to easily tag photos, and it even has face recognition called “Faces.” It’s a bit creepy how it can determine whose face belongs to who! You can edit the images easily, do fun effects on them, and even easily share images with friends. All around, Apple Photos is a winner.
GOOGLE PHOTOS
Are you a Gmail user? Or big on Google Docs? Then you should really consider using Google Photos to organize and have fun with your photos. Google Photos can upload from all your devices and it automatically organizes by people or places. You can edit your images in a flash. You can also easily share your images, even if the recipient doesn’t use Google Photos. It’s a great program to consider if you are already a Google Docs, Google Drive or Gmail user.
PROS AND CONS TO CONSIDER
Both programs use the cloud for photo storage, which is great. Overall, I think that Google’s Smart Search is better than what Apple Photos can do. You can search by animals, people, places and times and find that it’s remarkably accurate. On the other hand, I think Apple Photos has a better editing capability.
If you’re a PC user, then you can’t go wrong with Google Photos. If you’re a Mac user, you can consider both and I would suggest checking out both programs and seeing which one speaks more to you.
Personally, I think Apple Photos is a bit more intuitive, but that may just be because I’m an old expert at the previous version and just now starting to work more with Google Drive and other things Google.
FOR OUR PROJECT…..
This month, make a decision on what kind of photo organization program you want to use. These two programs are free and readily available. If you have a Mac, Photos is one of the built-in programs on your computer. If you use Google, simply go up to your grid and look for Google Photos.
Check out last month’s post that gets us started here.
