Photo organiser

[Dod101]

I run Windows 11 on my desktop and my photos are a complete mess. I have not been able to make anything of the photo software that comes with either Windows 10 (which I have on a laptop) or Windows 11.

Does anyone have any recs for what I might use (preferably free)?

I need to do the usual stuff like sort them in any order I want, but mostly date I suppose, the easy ability to send any one as an attachment to an email and other simple stuff. I am not into anything complicated but the ability to find something I am looking for would be a good help and of course the ability to download stuff from my iphone from time to time.

I am usually not bad at this sort of thing but I am stuck with photos.

Dod

[ReformedCharacter]

I need to do the usual stuff like sort them in any order I want, but mostly date I suppose, the easy ability to send any one as an attachment to an email and other simple stuff. I am not into anything complicated but the ability to find something I am looking for would be a good help and of course the ability to download stuff from my iphone from time to time.

I am usually not bad at this sort of thing but I am stuck with photos.

Dod

Changing the folder view in Windows Explorer to show your photos as large icons might be what you want, you can then sort according to date.

Here's a guide that demonstrates this:

https://www.elevenforum.com/t/change-folder-layout-view-in-windows-11-file-explorer.1246/

Although the guide shows folders rather than the files within, the process is the same to choose the size of the thumbnails.

If you are then not seeing thumbnails of your photos but just 'placeholders', then this should help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dgtvytXijk

RC

[CliffEdge]

There is a little thing bottom right of the folder that you can click to swap between details view and thumbs view

[xeny]

Darktable https://www.darktable.org/ ?

Free, but possibly overkill?

I just use a hierarchy of folders - year at the top level, and then date or event within that.

[Midsmartin]

Google's Picasa was good for this. It allowed you to easily sift through photos by date, and even had face recognition built in so you could easily find all your photos of Auntie Ethel together.
Google stopped development because they want you to upload all your stuff to the cloud.
However, Picasa still works and is still free:
Eg https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/detail ... nizer.html

The downside is that if there is some future Windows update that breaks it, then it will never be fixed.

[Redmires]

Another vote for Picasa. Still using it to edit & organise for my photos. I also use Irfanview for viewing photos and it has batch support for renaming photos etc. Works fine on Windows 10.

[Lanark]

As others have said, put all the files into simple folders in Windows Explorer.

Create a folder for each year and then sub folders for major events/holidays.

[Dod101]

Thanks for all of these prompt responses. I am sure I will be able to sort something from them. In the end of course only a very few of the photos I guess we all have will be on any value or interest in the long term but it is useful in the meanwhile to have a system that allows easy access in some sort of logical framework.

Dod

[servodude]

Google's Picasa was good for this.

I was bemoaning the lack of this on my windows 11 machine when after a bit of digging I discovered that most of what I needed was available in Microsoft Photos (including things like the facial recognition stuff)

I think the trick might just have been telling it where to look (our pics having been transfered over and living on a different disk from he default "Pictures:)

Once it had indexed everything the interface was very like Picassa (for the viewing by date stuff anyway i.e. with the dated scroll bar to the side)

-sd

[GrahamPlatt]

Another photo manager you might look at is Shotwell.

[martinc]

There was a Windows Essentials add-on for Windows 7 which included Windows Live Photo Gallery, which I still use and have never found anything better. You can organise your photos however you want, I have folders like 2015-07-03 like most people I suppose. You add the root directory to your 'gallery' and the program indexes them so that you can group and sort by date taken etc. (or just use folders if you like).

You can tag your photos by exif tag, so when I come back from holiday I tag all the photos 'Spain 2022' and then I can group the photos by tag and easily browse 'Spain 2015', 'Spain 2022' etc. Each tag can include 1000's of photos and they are sorted by date within the tag. The indexing is very fast, you can add a few hundred photos and you can browse by tag few seconds later.

Face recognition is supported, it used to do GPS locations but that stopped working a while ago. One useful feature is grouping by camera, you can group by 'Canon ixus 200', 'iphone 8' etc.

You can still download it from unoffical sources (look for wlsetup-all.exe) and it works with Windows 11, I don't expect you will want to do that.

Windows 10/11 Photos only sorts by date taken and doesn't do tags.