10 tips to organise your family photos

Simple habits for a family photo library you can keep up for years: folders by time, tags for people and places, ratings for the best shots, and finding duplicates.

A family photo library does not need a perfect system. It needs a few simple habits that you can keep up for twenty years. Folders say when a photo was taken. Tags say who and what is in it. Ratings say which ones matter. Here is how to put that together.

  1. Pick one home for every photo

    Gather phone, camera and old hard-drive photos into a single library. Everything you do afterwards (tagging, rating, slideshows) works better when there is exactly one place to look.

  2. Let time decide the folders

    Use year and month folders and nothing else. A photo can only sit in one folder, so keep the folder for "when" and use tags for everything else. The full layout is in how to structure your photos.

  3. Keep an inbox

    Import into an _Inbox folder first and sort from there. Nothing is lost while you decide, and your real library stays tidy.

  4. Name files so they sort anywhere

    Start filenames with the date and time (20261104_143012_IMG_0412.heic). The order stays correct on any computer, NAS or TV, even if the folders are flattened.

  5. Tag people, not folders

    Never create a folder per person. One photo of three cousins belongs to all three, and only tags can do that. Tag who is in the picture and you can show "all photos of Grandma" whenever you like.

  6. Tag places and occasions too

    A few consistent tags (a place, an event, a season) cover most of the questions you will ever ask of your library. Keep the list short and reuse the same spelling: "Ardennes", not "ardennes", "Ardenne" and "The Ardennes".

  7. Favourite while you remember

    Mark the best photos as favourites when you import them. Years later you will not remember which of 200 beach photos was the good one, and a slideshow of only your favourites is far better than all 200.

  8. Store tags inside the file or beside it

    Use standard metadata (XMP, in the file or as a photo.jpg.xmp sidecar) so your tags survive moving to another app. Avoid anything that lives only in one app's private database. See how to structure your photos for the fields.

  9. Find duplicates (coming soon)

    Phone backups, shared albums and old imports leave you with the same photo several times. Duplicates are best found by comparing file content, not filenames, and removed only after you have looked at them. Duplicate detection is a coming-soon feature in familyTV.

  10. Never edit originals, and keep a backup

    Keep originals untouched, store edits and tags separately, and follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else.

Want the details behind tip 2 and tip 8? Read How to organise a family photo library that outlives every app.