Have you ever tried to find a particular photo or document on your computer and it just wasn’t there? It is all about organisation and you have to become your own private librarian. Even if you only have a dozen books, if they were all in loose pages instead of bound, you would have difficulties finding what you are looking for.
The same thing applies to your computer: instead of books you have folders, and every folder has a number of documents or files in it. You generally have predefined folders like Documents, Photos, Downloads etc, but you can expand that by creating sub-folders, e.g. within Documents you could have Letters, Recipes, Newsletters,…. You can then narrow down the area where to look for a particular file.
The more files you have, the more important is organisation. How many photos have you stored on your computer? If they are all in one folder (Photos) and are just named by the generated number or date, it will be very difficult to find a particular shot of Uncle Fred. But if you created folders (e.g. Tina’s Wedding, Holiday in Bali…) then it will be much easier; and if you then renamed the photos as you store them to something that makes sense, like Uncle Fred, Cucumbers,…. It is really easy to find what you are looking for.
Doing this as you store new photos is not that hard, but if you already have a collection of 1000s, you
might have to spend a few winter evenings going through it all – it might be worth it.
As long as you have file names that mean something, you can then use the Search function to look for items, and at least narrow down the number of files you will have to check.
To some extend the photos app on your device might be able to help you by automatically sorting photos by certain criteria – but it can be a bit hit and miss.
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