“Remember that stunning sunset photo I captured last year? I wonder if I could find it again or have I lost it forever?”
Imagine having hundreds of thousands of photos but not being able to find the right ones. Does it happen with you as well? I assume, quite often.
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People take great shots believing that they will bring them great joy and help relive the moment in the future. Unluckily, this does not always happen as they expected it to be. If you have a vast image library, it is crucial to organize it periodically. Interested in learning how to do it? We have got some tips and tricks. Follow with us to learn some cool techniques and benefit from it. Let’s begin.
Importance of Photo Organization
The importance of photo organization is often neglected until the user experiences some kind of trouble fetching a particular photo. Here are the key benefits of regularly organizing your photos:
- Regularly organizing your files will make browsing through your folders, sub-folders less-confusing.
- Photo organization will keep your images stored in an orderly manner so you can find them when you need them the most.
- If you have a disorganized file library, Windows Search will take ages to search through it. When you organize your photos, a simple Windows search will reveal the results much quicker.
- A clean, organized photo library will take lower storage compared to a disorganized one.
- Last but not the least, organizing an image library has other economic benefits. For instance, if you are dumping everything on the cloud, it would cost you a lot. Organizing your photos will help reduce storage requirements and bring down the cost significantly.
How to Organize Your Photos?
Over the past few years, computing (and everything related to it) has gone through tremendous advancement. Gone are the days when you needed to manually compare each and every photo on your hard disk. Today the software programs can automate these tasks and save you a lot of time and efforts spent in organizing your photos.
You can find duplicate pictures using the context menu in Windows 10 File Explorer. A specialized duplicate finder PictureEcho will help you accomplish it.
Finding Duplicate Photos Using Context Menu
PictureEcho has a beginner-friendly and straightforward interface. The top header region has a bulk of options to customize and start the scan. The bottom part occupies 2/3rd of the interface and displays the thumbnails of duplicate files found in your desired directory/ drive.
Step 1: Download Specialized Duplicate Image Finder PictureEcho
- Download and install PictureEcho on your computer.
- Double-click the PictureEcho desktop icon to launch the software.
- Click on the Settings link at the bottom right corner of the PictureEcho window.
- Select the Add in File Explorer context menu option in the General tab.
- Click on OK.
Step 2: Search your Folders for Duplicates
- Open File Explorer in Windows 10 and browse to the directory you want to scan for duplicates.
- Right-click a folder and select Scan with PictureEcho.
- PictureEcho will open up and add the selected folder to the scan list.
- Select one of the options from the Exact Match and Similar Match:
- Exact Match: This option is useful when you want to look for images that match bit-to-bit. Prefer this option if you’re looking to search for identical pictures.
- Similar Match: Use this option if you want to look for visually similar images, in addition to exact matching pictures. It has huge potential to free-up large space but be sure to use it wisely.
- Now in the Similarity Criteria section, move the slider to the right to increase it, and move it to the left to decrease.
- Click on Start Search.
Step 3: Review & Fix Duplicates
Once the search results are accumulated, you’ll see image thumbnails. Use the checkboxes to manually mark or unmark files. PictureEcho will process (delete or move) all marked files and keep the unmarked file as it is.
Best of all, PictureEcho has an automatic selection feature. Click on the Select Duplicates button and choose your desired pattern.
- Retain the smallest/ biggest image in each group: PE makes it super easy to keep the smallest or biggest images in each group without having the user to do anything on their part.
- Retain the lowest/ highest resolution image in each group: Retaining high-resolution pictures will give you high-quality photos. However, higher-quality means a compromise on the storage size. These images could occupy more space than low-resolution pictures.
- Retain the newest/ oldest image in each group: If you’re into photo editing, you could have multiple versions of the same photos. Use this option to specify whether to keep the original (oldest) images or keep the newest (modified) versions.
- Select by image locations: Sometimes, you might want to keep files unchanged from specific directories. Use this option to batch mark or unmark files located in your desired folder(s).
- Unselect all: Use this option to automatically unmark all the images to start selecting afresh.
Bonus Tip 1: Delete Empty Folders & Enjoy Organized File System
Do you know that you could have too many empty folders on your hard disk? Though empty folders don’t consume storage space, they are a big hurdle while navigating through your directories. It’s recommended to regularly clean empty folders to maintain a clean, organized file system.
- To delete empty folders, set the Scan Mode to Clean Empty Folders.
- Click on Launch Service.
- Click on Add Path and choose the top-most folder you want to scan for empty folders. You can also add multiple paths if required.
- Click on Delete Empty Folders to proceed.
Bonus Tip 2: Organize the Images & Enjoy Organized File System
You can use the Image Organizer feature to neatly organize your collection of images into a database of sorts. You can choose to either copy the images or if you want to move them. Further, you you can choose if you want to organize the newly created directory by years, year and month, or year, month and date. And much more!
