Know How... 35

You've got tons of photos everywhere! Find out the tricks and tips to collect and organize all of your pics.

Collecting Your Photos

Before we organize anything, we should try to get all of our photos in one place. One of the easiest ways to collect all your photos is via Dropbox. If you're unfamiliar with Dropbox, it is an online storage locker for your files. You get 2GB of storage for free. Find out more about Dropbox here. Here's a signup link to Dropbox.

Dropbox recently introduced a feature called "Camera Upload." If you have the Dropbox app on your iOS or Android device, you can have any photos and videos you take on those devices automatically uploaded to Dropbox. This works great if you have multiple devices like a tablet and a phone. Also, since you're using Dropbox, your files are also available in the cloud, which is always nice for backup.

You can also grab any photos you're tagged in on Facebook using Social Photo Download.

To make sure that any future photos of you are collected, try out IFTT. IFTT stands for "If This Then That," which connects all kinds of web services. In the case you get tagged in Instagram, it can be automatically saved to your Dropbox using this recipe. (IFTT calls its combined services "recipes"). There's a similar one for Facebook - here's the recipe for if tagged in Facebook, then save in your Dropbox. We covered the ways you can use IFTT in "Know How..." episode 20.

Apart from social networks, you might have a bunch of photos in your email. Check out this app called "Lost Photos." It's free and it searches through your email to find any photos that are in your accounts. It costs $3 on Mac OS X.

Photo Management

Iyaz recommends Picasa from Google. It is the free software download, not to be confused with Picasa Web (the online photo service from Google). The program is available for Windows and Mac and can even search for duplicate files in your library. If you want to be able to upload your files to more than just Google, try out the Picasa Uploader for Facebook.

Leo really likes Adobe Lightroom as his photo manager. It's incredibly powerful and can handle pretty much any file format you can throw at it. The app works on Windows and Mac and costs a bit over $100. Here's a link if you want to download Adobe Lightroom.

Both Picasa and Lightroom respect whatever your file structure is. They don't move around your pictures to new locations like iPhoto does.

For backup, Leo suggests ChronoSync for Mac ($40) and SyncToy for Windows (free).

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