This month we continue to clear out the clutter in your Digital Photo Hub (DPH). Don’t have a DPH yet? See our March 2019 Newsletter. Missed the first organizing step? See the May 2019 Newsletter.
July Tip – Delete Duplicates as You Go
This month’s step in organizing your digital photos is to delete duplicates. If you haven’t done this before, you may be amazed at how many can sneak into your collection! Once you’ve cleaned duplicates out of your collection, you’ll be more aware of adding them to your collection. An easy way to control this is to address duplicates as you go – when you take multiple pictures take a few seconds to delete the extras. Delete them as you go and the next time you download your pictures you may be pleasantly surprised at how few duplicates you have!
Digital Photo Organization – Delete the Duplicates
If you have been following along with our Newsletters this year you will have gathered all your photos and videos to a single location called your Digital Photo Hub, created an inventory of your collection and have moved things into an “organized mess”. Our next step is to identify and delete the duplicate images so we will have fewer images to deal with as we organize.
We accumulate duplicate images in a number of ways – taking lots of pictures of something to get the best shot, setting our cameras to take multiple pictures, copying images into other folders to work with them, posting our pictures to social media pages – these are some of the more common ways duplicates end up in our collections. When we find duplicate images, we want to make sure we keep the best image and delete the others. The fastest and most reliable way to do this is to utilize software designed for this process. I recommend Duplicate Cleaner Pro or Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder for the PC and Photo Sweeper for the MAC. You will want to play with the software a bit to see how the settings work. Make sure you set it up to compare the duplicates for you, keep the best image and move the others to your “To Delete” file. I like to use the “To Delete” file rather than the trash in case you need to check something or retrieve an image. It’s much faster to locate them in your “To Delete” file than in your trash – and there’s no chance they will be deleted for good until you are ready to do so.
Use your software and compare any duplicate images it identifies – keep the image with the higher resolutions or size and move the others. You may have to run the software a few times to clear out the most duplicates. In some software programs you can change the percentage match of the images – if you search at less than 100% you will also find photos that are near duplicates – the ones like the group shots you took where people just moved a little bit or facial expressions changed – these are great to clear out now too, just select your favourite image and move the others to the “To Delete” file.
Once you have used the software to clear out the bulk of your duplicate images, I like to scan the collection to see what else I can clear out – look for photos of specific events like birthday parties. If you have 10 pictures of your child unwrapping gifts at their birthday party, you can choose your favourite 1 or 2 photos to keep and move the rest to the “To Delete” folder. A smaller collection of good photos tells the story better than a large, cluttered collection.
I like to do a final scan of the photo collection looking for “bad” photos – these are the pictures you took of the floor, the inside of your purse, your fingers – you know the ones! I don’t spend a lot of time hunting them down at this point, just do a quick scan and see if any jump out at you!
Make note of the number of duplicates you found and moved to your “To Delete” folder. To make this step faster going forward be sure to try to “Delete as You Go”!
This is a good point to make a backup copy of your Digital Photo Hub. In the next newsletter we will decide on a chronological or thematic organizational structure and move you one step closer to a beautifully organized photo collection!