Because we are constantly carrying a camera, we produce many more photos than ever. With that flood of snapshots and videos, you gradually lose the overview, especially if you are too enthusiastic about the offer of various free online storage drives. Saving your photos is one, smart software for tagging, sorting and categorizing all those photos is therefore desperately needed. We look at the possibilities of the heavy guns Dropbox, OneDrive and Google.
Tip 01: Folder structure
For many computer users, Dropbox remains the number one when it comes to cloud-based storage. Dropbox (free 2 GB web space) makes it easy to synchronize files online, but in the field of photo management this service has lost many of its prizes in recent years. Dropbox ’photo manager Carousel was redesigned in 2016 and even the function of creating simple photo albums died a silent death. In its support pages this service shows two ways to organize your visual material: via Camera uploads and via the button Photos. But there is a third way, the one with the handmade folders. Create on your PC in the folder Dropbox a local folder Photos and create a logical structure of sub- and sub-subfolders. Suppose you have a folder To travel , then you create the folders there 2017Rome, 2018 Ardennes, 2019Brittany and so on. Dropbox will then automatically make an online backup. This is also the easiest way to share the folders with others.
Organization per day
If you take a lot of photos, it can be more convenient to arrange them by day or by month. Tru is a tool with which you first select a source folder with unordered photo files on a drive, for example the local Dropbox folder. Then create a new empty destination folder in the same directory. Then Tru will transfer the contents of the source folder to the target folder in the background and generate folders per month or day. You have the choice between subfolders according to the YYYY MMMformat (for example 2017-Aug), the YYYY-MMformat (for example 2017-08) or YYYY-MMM-dd (e.g. 2017-Aug-16). You can also select different source folders and then transfer them all to the same destination folder per day or per month. With the free version you can distribute 5,000 photos that way, if you want to do this unlimited, you have to pay $ 19.95 per year.
Tip 02: Camera uploads
When you Camera uploads if you switch on a mobile device, the contents of your camera roll will end up in the same-named folder on Dropbox. Open the app on your smartphone or tablet, go to your profile and tap the gear icon to at Camera uploads to come. Here you can also indicate whether you want to upload videos automatically. At the bottom of this screen you indicate whether you want to apply this function from now on or to all photos of the camera roll. Moreover, Dropbox asks if you want to convert the photos in the heic format to the jpg format. Although Dropbox recommends the conversion, it also simply supports heic and heiv files. Heic is the image format, the video format that Apple devices get from iOS 11. All these media files end up in the same folder: Camera Uploads. There you can sort them by name, change date, type, extension and size. Adding tags or creating albums is not possible. Select your favorite photos with a star then again.
As you scroll through the list, you suddenly see all the photos that you have never uploaded yourself
Tip 03: The Photos button
In the web version of Dropbox is also the button on the left Photos which places all photo files on a timeline and groups them by day. That sounds good, but if you scroll through the list, you will notice that there are many photos that you have never saved yourself. This incident occurs when Dropbox synchronizes a folder containing, for example, screen images or illustrations of a graphic design. These images will also be included in the list of Photos to show up. For example, it happened that all portrait photos of a colleague from a staff list were caught in this way between our personal photos.
Tip 04: Organized
Microsoft OneDrive (5 GB free storage) is also primarily intended for those who no longer want to be tied to a fixed workplace. Also with this service, photo management is not the main issue. In Windows 10, OneDrive is integrated, but if you want to use it on a different operating system, then you must install it yourself. This service also recognizes the photos between your files and places them in the folder Photos. OneDrive organizes the photos itself by day, month and year. The recent snapshots are at the top. In addition, OneDrive uses artificial intelligence in an attempt to provide the new photos with keywords. Although we notice that the inspiration from Microsoft is not nearly as striking as that from Google Photos.
Microsoft’s keyword inspiration is not nearly as striking as that of Google Photos
Tip 05: Keywords
Tags are particularly useful for quickly finding a photo later. The keyword proposals are preceded by a hashtag. When you press the button Tags click, you will see all the keywords that OneDrive suggests. Clicking on a photo opens the album view. At the top right is a round icon with a i to open the information about the photo. Select the photos whose keywords you want to adjust and then click the button at the top Edit tags. Now you can add your own keywords or add one or more tags to the photo (s) that OneDrive proposes itself.
Tip 06: Albums
OneDrive automatically creates albums based on the day you recorded the photo or video. If you don’t like that, you can disable this function in the OneDrive settings. To do this, click on the gear and then the button Photos.
If you want to share some photos with your friends, you can put them in an album. Select Albums and after that New album, give the new album a name. Then select the photos and click Add album.
Bundled view
If you use more than one cloud service, then one day you pull your hair out, because you no longer know which service you saved that one photo with. MultCloud handles more than thirty online drives as if it were one large hard drive. With the free version you can collect up to 2 TB of data, after that the service is quite expensive ($ 7.99 per month). You can find an alternative in the Microsoft Store: Cloud Drive (free, with advertising) to manage the contents of OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox from one application. For the iPhone and iPad there is EasyCloud Ultimate (4.99 euros) to show all your photos and videos on the discussed online storage locations on your device or Apple TV.
Tip 07: End of synchronization
With a Google account you have 15 GB of free storage space that is distributed over Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. Until July 10, 2019, all photos that you have saved in Google Drive always appeared in Google Photos. Because many users found this confusing, Google has stopped synchronizing between the two services. This means that an operation that you perform in Google Photos is no longer automatically applied to the copy in Google Drive. And when you delete an image on Drive, it will just remain in Photos unless you remove it there too. If you eventually run out of space, remember that the uploads from before the divorce date are still on both Drive and Photos.
You can search all photos for keywords that you didn’t even have to add yourself
Tip 08: Backup / synchronization
If it gives you more peace of mind to automatically upload photos to Google Drive and Google Photos, you can use the backup and synchronization app from Google. Start the app, log in with your Google account and select the folders that you want to back up to Google Drive. For photos you have the choice between High Quality and Original quality. Bee High Quality Google will compress photos that are larger than 16 megapixels and videos with a resolution higher than 1080p. These compressed files do not count towards the calculation of your data capacity. At the bottom of the app you will find the box to automatically upload your photos and videos to Google Photos. This is also a great solution for saving a backup of your photos, and if you want to be able to browse the same snapshots on Google Photos.
Tip 09: Organizational talent
Google Drive may be interesting to save a backup of your photos, but it does not match the organizational talent of Google Photos that through all kinds of intelligent functions manages to create order in every photo chaos. First, Google Photos sorts all snapshots by date, with the newest at the top. It is very nice that you can search all photos for keywords that you did not even have to add yourself. You vaguely remember a photo with an orangutan or a photo on which someone sticks out his tongue, but where are they again? We found them immediately if we typed “orangutan” or “tongue” in the search box. The integrated Assistant can also help you to make a photo album, video, collage or montage so that you can share it with your friends. In some countries, Google Photos distinguishes itself through face recognition, something that its predecessor Picasa was also good at, but in the Netherlands that function is not possible due to privacy legislation.
