Right, so the name Alejandro Garcia popped up the other day. Don’t ask me how or why, sometimes names just get stuck in your head, you know? So, naturally, I went looking, trying to figure out who this person was or what they did. Spent a bit of time poking around online.
Anyway, that search went nowhere fast. Typical internet rabbit hole. But while I was digging around, clicking through stuff, I stumbled onto this completely unrelated forum thread. People were talking about organizing their old digital photos. And it hit me – my own photo situation was a disaster. Years of pictures just dumped into random folders on my hard drive. A real mess.
Tackling the Photo Chaos
So, I ditched the Alejandro Garcia search for the day. Decided it was finally time to sort out those pictures. Seemed like a better use of my time, honestly.
Here’s what I did:
- First, I grabbed all the photo folders scattered across my main drive and my backup drive. Pulled them all into one temporary ‘UNSORTED’ folder. Seeing the total size was… humbling. Lots of gigs.
- Then, I started going through them, folder by folder. The idea was to create a simple structure, mainly by year. So, folders like ‘2023’, ‘2022’, ‘2021’, and so on.
- Inside each year, I thought about adding subfolders for big events or months. Like ‘2022/06 – Trip to the Coast’ or just ‘2022/01’, ‘2022/02’ if nothing major happened. Kept it pretty basic.
- Deleting duplicates was the next big step. Found a little freeware tool – can’t remember the name now – that helped sniff out identical or very similar-looking photos. Saved a ton of space. Had to manually check its suggestions though, didn’t want to lose anything important by mistake.
- This took ages, by the way. Had to do it in chunks over a few evenings. Lots of clicking, dragging, deleting. Mind-numbing stuff, really.
- Finally, once everything was sorted into the new year/event structure, I backed it all up properly onto an external drive. And then backed that up to another drive. Can’t be too careful.
It wasn’t exactly rocket science, just tedious work. But getting it done felt good. Now I can actually find photos from specific times without wanting to tear my hair out. Way more satisfying than chasing down random names online.
Still no idea who Alejandro Garcia is, though. Maybe next time.
