How awful does it feel to open a digital photo and not remember anything about it? I’ve written about organizing files and photos for more than a decade, and frankly, no one who needs to do it wants to do it. And a majority of people won’t do it at all anyway. Why? Because it’s such a pain. 

So here I’m going to share with you a super simple way to organize digital photos that takes the absolute least amount of effort. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than nothing.

What I’m not going to discuss is the process of scanning old photos, or transferring pictures from Facebook, Instagram, Google Photos, Flickr, your phone, or wherever else you store them, and consolidating them. This article assumes you’ve already done that part.

So with that in mind, imagine finding an old photo. What do you want to know about it? For me, there are three answers in this order of importance:

1. When was it taken? 

2. Who’s in it? (If it’s a family photo, you’re likely able to identify at least one person, which is why this question is only second in importance.) 

3. Where was it taken?

Let those three answers be the guideposts to organizing your images.

1. When Was the Photo Taken?

If you do nothing else at all, do this step: Batch organize your photo files by date. 

I use the tried-and-true method of setting up folders named for different years. I call them year folders. If you’ve read my articles before, you’ve seen this trick before. The reason I talk about it all the time is because it works and it’s so simple.

Here’s an example. I have folders called 2022, 2021, 2020, and so forth. Within those folders are subfolders that are also labeled by date, like 2022-Photos or 2022-10-Photos for photos taken in October (the tenth month), 2022. Do you need the dashes? No. I use them because I was trained to use them and never broke the habit. For subfolders, I like to still include the year as part of the name because if the folder even gets moved accidentally, I know immediately where it belongs. It also helps when I use the search function to look for files, folders, and images.

Setting up year folders and subfolders is fast, easy, and kind of foolproof. You can’t really mess it up.

Now select all the images that were taken in a given year and move them to the corresponding year folder. I recommend sorting your images by date to do this step. 

Will the results be perfect? No. One reason is sometimes your computer assigns a date to a photo based on when you imported it rather than when you shot it. That’s OK. Chances are most of your images will end up in the correct year. You can always do some cleanup later, but like I said at the start, people who need to organize their photos generally don’t do it at all. So rather than aim for perfect results, just do the bare minimum to make your photo organization better or good enough.

2. Who’s in the Photo?

If you’ve batch-organized your photos into year folders and still have the stamina to do a little more tidying, the next point to tackle is who’s in the pictures. 

In all likelihood, you know the people in your photos, or at least you can identify them today. Will that be the case two decades from now? Or when you share photos with other people? Or if someone inherits your data.

Sticking with the idea of organizing photos in a way that takes minimal effort, I have two suggestions. One is to use face recognition. The other is to add your subjects’ names to the file name.

Use Facial Recognition

Facial recognition in this context means you tell a photo app “this person here is Jill Duffy,” and after giving it a few examples, it’s able to identify Jill Duffy’s face in all other photos in your collection. Many photo editing apps have facial recognition, including apps that come included with devices, such as Apple Photos. Voilà. As long as you continue to use this particular photo app, you can easily find pictures of certain people.

Facial recognition isn’t for everyone, whether you’re simply opposed to it on principle or you find that it isn’t accurate enough. As an example, two of my sisters—who are not twins—constantly confuse facial recognition software.

Add Subjects’ Names to the File Name

I like to add people’s names to the image file name. For example, a picture of Sue Ellen and me in October 2022 might be 2022-10_Jill-SueEllen or 2022-10_Jill and Sue Ellen Mischke. Do you need to include surnames? It’s up to you.

Remember, we’re looking for quick ways to make photos more organized. If I search my computer for Sue Ellen, I want to be able to find pictures of her and this naming structure accomplishes that.

You can manually type Jill and Sue Ellen’s names, but that’s tedious, especially if you have a lot of photos of those two. A faster way is to automate the process. Here’s a tutorial for automatically renaming files in Windows. Dropbox has a similar feature for renaming multiple files at once as well. 

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You can download specialized tools for auto-renaming, too, although if you don’t want to bother with any of that, just come up with a core file name, copy it, paste it as the new file name, and add -01. Repeat the process, changing the last digit. So all you have to type is Ctrl-v, backspace, and the new final number. Easy.

Another easy solution is to just make a subfolder and use a similar naming technique for the folder name. Whether you decide to rename the individual photos depends on how much work and time you want to put into it.

What About Metadata?

A photographer might tell you that the “proper” way to add names of people and descriptions to photo files is to put them in the metadata. Metadata in this context means text connected to the photo that gives you information about it, such as a title, description, and some technical details, too. If you’re not a photo enthusiast, however, I’d skip it.

3. Where Was the Photo Taken?

The last big piece of information about many photos is where it was taken. Sometimes the where is intertwined with the when. If you’re looking for photos from a wedding, you might remember the month and year when it happened. Christmas pictures will be from December. My family’s vacation is always in July or August. So the date might be your first clue, and if you’ve sorted your pictures into year folders, you’ve already done some of the organization.

Depending on the device you used to take the photo, you might have location data embedded in the file already. That’s a big help.

Pictures from your travels can easily be lumped together into a subfolder with the name of the place. Before you give your subfolder a name, I recommend thinking about whether you have more than one way to say the place you went. For example, if you were in Tuscany and Rome, you might name the folder 2022 Tuscany Rome Italy. Cover all your bases. Five years from now you might go looking for your pictures of “our trip to Italy.” It won’t be so helpful if you called the folder Tuscany.

If you have a lot of pictures of landscapes and objects, you might use the same file naming structure that I suggested for people only with the name of the thing or place instead. 2022-11_Reclining Buddha Bangkok-01 should do the trick.

Remember, It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect

So much of organizing our digital lives is about making things better—not perfect. Wouldn’t it be ideal to have the time, energy, and attention span to go through all your digital photos one at a time adding titles, descriptions, locations, and other metadata to preserve them perfectly? For me the answer is…no. I really don’t care that much about having a perfectly organized photo collection. I just want my pictures to be organized well enough so that they’re usable, so that I can find the ones I want when I want them without too much effort.

I encourage you to think about what’s good enough for you, as it might be different than what’s good enough for me. Take your answer and the tips I’ve shared here to come up with a way to organize your photos that meets your actual needs. It doesn’t have to be perfect.