July Tip – Set your iPhone to take JPGs rather than HEICs
In 2017 Apple changed the format of the pictures we take with our iPhones from JPGs to HEICs. The HEIC format has better resolution and takes up less space than a JPG. Unfortunately, not everyone has joined the HEIC movement and it has become difficult to work with photos in the HEIC format outside of the Apple ecosystem. If you have experienced difficulty transferring pictures from your iPhone to your PC in the last few years, or sending photos to family and friends, this new format could be the reason. You can change the format of the photos your iPhone is snapping – go to Settings/Camera/Formats and select Most Compatible to capture photos as JPGs. Select High Efficiency to capture photos as HEIC.
Organize the Videos in your Digital Photo Collection
We have been enjoying watching the videos in our digital photo collection while we have all been at home. I organize our video collection just as I do our photo collection, in chronological folders with the date as the name of the video. Sometimes I add the event after the date for videos I might want to track down quicker but, for the most part, naming them with the date they were taken works great.
Working with videos is more difficult than organizing your photos. We can’t add metadata to videos as consistently as we can with a photo and there are very few software programs designed to help with sorting and re-naming video. In fact, most photo organizing programs completely ignore any video!
Here are the steps I follow for organizing our videos:
- Download all video for a year to the computer.
- View the video files in Detail mode or add a column to you view to show the capture date for each video.
- Sort videos by this capture date field.
- Then I manually select and re-name the videos for each day – highlight all videos with a capture date of November 10, 2019, right click on the first video and select rename. I type in 2019-11-10 (1) and hit enter. The selected videos are renamed to the date with a sequential number.
- Any videos that I might try to find quickly will have the event added after the sequential number – I highlight the individual video and rename it with the event name – 2019-11-10 (1) Guitar Recital
There are a few ways you can keep your videos in your digital photo hub:
- Within each year folder you could have a folder for photos and a folder for videos.
- Within your hub you can have a general folder for photos containing each year folder and a general folder for videos containing each year folder (this is how I structure mine)
- You can have a single folder for each year and leave the videos mixed in with the photos within this folder.
Each structure has pros and cons, it comes down to how you will most likely use your photos and videos. Happy organizing!