How to organise photos in iOS and Android

An easy way to improve the quality of your photos is to take masses and only share the very best ones. A great composition or a winning smile is often captured by chance, so take ten times more photos than you need and you’ll stack the odds heavily in your favour.

The downside is that it takes time to sift through hundreds of photos to pick out the best ones. The whole thing backfires if you never get around to doing this you’ll end up with thousands of photos that never see the light of day.

The solution is to get them organised before you get home. Journeys home from holidays and days out are ideal for sifting through your photos. Rather than just gaze at them admiringly, why not get them organised and pick out your favourites?

You could do this simply by reviewing the photos on the camera and jotting down the file names of your favourites. However, getting your smartphone or tablet involved can make the experience much more convenient and rewarding. For one thing, their screens are significantly bigger and sharper than the screens on the back of cameras. With the right app, you can tag and rate photos so they’re already neatly organised when you copy them onto your computer. In fact, you can skip the computer’s involvement entirely and upload your favourite photos directly from your phone or tablet to an online photo-sharing service.

Some cameras, such as recent Canon EOS SLRs, let you add star ratings to photos directly in the camera. With the EOS 6D and 70D, you can also do this via the EOS Remote app and take advantage of a smartphone or tablet’s bigger screen. However, while each photo can be given a rating from one to five stars, it’s not possible to sort or filter them by ratings.

This is a crucial feature for our preferred method for picking the best photos from a large set. It allows you to go through and award one star to all photos that have some merit. Then you can go through these one-star photos and promote the better ones to two stars. Repeat this process as necessary and you quickly end up with a small selection of the very best photos. It’s also useful to have a reserves list, in case you suddenly realise there are no photos of a particular person in the set. You might also want to share half a dozen on Facebook but include 20 or 30 to share with close friends and family. Using a five-star rating system lets you handle these tasks quickly and easily.

^ The EOS Remote app for Wi-Fi-enabled Canon SLRs let you rate photos without the need to copy them to a phone or tablet

To sort a folder of photos by star rating in Windows Explorer, right-click the folder and select Group by, More, tick Rating and click OK. You’ll then need to right-click again and select Group by, Rating.

Transferring photos

Before you can rate your photos using an app, you need to get them onto the smartphone or tablet. It’s clearly not an issue if you’re using the device’s integrated camera. It’s also pretty easy if your camera has Wi-Fi built in. All the Wi-Fi cameras we’ve seen recently have companion apps for both iOS and Android that handle wireless transfers to the device’s local storage. If your camera doesn’t include this function, consider getting an Eye-Fi card. These SD cards cost from £32 and have Wi-Fi adapters built in for wireless transfers to iOS and Android devices. The more expensive Eye-Fi Pro X2 cards can also transfer to PCs and support RAW format images – more on this later.

Another option is to plug your camera’s memory card into your phone or tablet. For the latest Apple devices, you’ll need the Apple Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader or, for older devices, the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit. Both cost £25 from http://store.apple.com/uk.

If your Android device has a microSD card slot, you could simply use a microSD card in your camera. These tiny cards usually come with an adapter so you can use them in your camera’s standard SD slot. Their prices and performance compare reasonably well with standard-sized SD cards. One advantage of this method is that you don’t have to copy the photos onto the Android device’s internal storage; the Android photo-viewing app (see below) should be able to access the microSD card directly.

If your Android device doesn’t have a microSD slot or you don’t want to ditch your full-size SD card collection, you might be able to use a USB Host On The Go (OTG) cable. This has a Micro USB plug at one end for the Android device and a full-size USB socket on the other. You can use this to connect either your camera directly (using the USB cable that came with the camera) or a USB card reader. Not all Android devices support USB Host OTG, and it’s not always easy to find out which ones do and don’t. The Lenovo Yoga tablet we used for testing worked fine but our Nexus 4 phone didn’t. These cables only cost a pound or two, though, so it’s not too expensive to give it a test run. Again, the app should be able to access the memory card directly without having to copy photos to the Android device’s local storage first.

How to Organise photos in Android

The best Android app we’ve found for the job is F-Stop Media Gallery by Seelye Engineering (www.fstopapp.com). It’s free, but there’s a version called F-Stop Media Gallery Key with additional features for £3.99. We’ll explain the benefit of the paid-for version below.

F-Stop automatically located all the folders on our Android device that contained photos, including folders in our microSD card and in a normal SD card connected using a USB Host OTG cable and a card reader. However, we sometimes needed to hit the Refresh button after connecting a card. Tapping a folder shows thumbnails of the photos, and tapping a thumbnail reveals a larger view of that photo. All pretty standard so far. However, in this view it’s possible to apply star ratings from one to five. Go through the folder and apply one star to any half decent photo, and then tap the top-left of the screen to go back to thumbnail view. Here you’ll find a Sort by button, where you can select Rating. This groups all the one-star photos together, ready to promote the best of these to two stars. The app re-sorts the photos each time you return to thumbnail view, so you can quickly promote the best two-star photos to three stars and so on until they’re narrowed down to a useful number.

You can then upload the selection directly to Facebook or any other photo-hosting site via its associated app. In thumbnail view, long tap a photo to select it and then tap the other photos you want. Tap the Share button and select the app for the social media service you want to publish to.

^ F-Stop Media Gallery is a superb replacement for Android’s built-in Gallery app

Full-resolution photos can weigh in at anything from 2MB to 10MB, so for quicker uploads, consider uploading via a resizing app. There are plenty available on the Google Play store; we tried Resize MyPix, which worked without any fuss. Just send the selected photos from F-Stop to Resize MyPix, whereupon you’ll be asked to what size you want to convert them. Then tap Share, select the Facebook (or other) app and you’re away.

F-Stop Media Gallery can also add keywords to photos, such as the names of people in photos or the place it was taken. It’s then possible to browse photos by tags, regardless of the containing folder. Photos can also be added to albums, and Smart Albums can be created with multiple filter criteria – for example, all the photos with a “seaside” tag rated three stars or higher.

One feature the free version of F-Stop doesn’t support is the ability to embed ratings and keywords into the JPEG files. It’s not much of a problem if you’re content to share photos directly from the smartphone or tablet. However, when rating files directly on an SD or microSD card without copying them to the device’s internal storage, we found that ratings and tags were forgotten when we removed and reinserted the card.

Upgrading to F-Stop Media Gallery Key for £4 unlocks an option called Save Metadata. This embeds the ratings and tags directly into the JPEG file, so they can be read by Windows and desktop software such as Adobe Lightroom.

F-Stop Media Gallery doesn’t support RAW files. We hoped to find a workaround by shooting in RAW + JPEG mode and rating and tagging the JPEGs. This works insofar as the app happily ignores the RAW files, but you’ll need to pick out the companion RAW files manually. Lightroom treats companion RAW and JPEG files as a single image, but unfortunately uses the (non-existent) tags and ratings from the RAW files rather than picking them up from the associated JPEGs.

There’s a number of RAW-handling Android apps on offer, but we found it hard to make any single one work across numerous devices and camera RAW formats reliably. It’s worth trying both RawVisionDemo and RawDroid Demo before buying the one you prefer, both let you organise and rate photos.

How to Organise photos in iOS

As is usually the case, there are some sophisticated apps available for the iOS operating system, but they’re held back by Apple’s draconian rules on how apps can access the hardware and operating system. The only app that has access to SD cards attached to the Camera Connection Kit is Apple’s own Photos app. Apps can read from and write to the Camera Roll, where photos are stored, but they can’t edit the metadata of existing photos.

Photo Manager Pro by Linkus (www.linkusnow.com) costs £2 from the App Store and is compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It can organise photos into folders, crop them and add captions. It can also add five-star ratings and sort by rating, so you can whittle down a large collection to find your favourites using the technique described above.

^ Photo Manager Pro can apply star ratings to photos and is compatible with both the iPhone and iPad

Photos from your camera must first be imported into the device’s Camera Roll, and then imported into the app. Pick or create a folder inside the app first, and then select Import, From Library, Last Import. This makes additional copies of the photos, so you’ll need 2GB of storage in your iOS device for every 1GB of photos. To reduce the space needed a little, visit the Settings and enable the Reduce Photo Size option. This resizes photos to around 5 megapixels (and roughly 1MB) as they’re imported, which is still plenty big enough to share online.

Once you’ve identified the photos you want to share, select them and hit the Share button to upload them to Facebook, Twitter or to send via email. If you want to send your pictures elsewhere, such as to Flickr or Google+, you’ll need to export your chosen photos back to the Camera Roll first – making yet another copy. It’s a bit clumsy, not least because the iOS Photos app lacks the ability to delete groups of photos quickly. Instead, each one must be selected individually before hitting Delete.

Photo Manager Pro can handle photo transfers by HTTP or FTP across a local network, so photos can be uploaded and downloaded using a web browser. It’s a great way to manage a photo library without the hassle of going through the iOS Camera Roll. It’s not much use while you’re out and about, though. Ratings aren’t embedded into the JPEGs’ metadata, and the web browser interface doesn’t show star ratings, so there’s no way of knowing what ratings you applied to photos once they’ve left the app. Our best solution was to create a dedicated folder in the app for the highest-rated photos we wanted to share, copy the photos to that folder, download them to the PC via the web interface and then delete the folder in the app.

^ The Adobe Lightroom app for iPad lets you get started on colour correction before you get home. It’s a shame it’s only available to Creative Cloud subscribers

Various other iOS apps are designed to sync with Lightroom, not least Adobe’s own Lightroom app for iPad. It can pluck photos from the Camera Roll, apply star ratings and even perform various edits such as cropping and colour correction, all of which sync with the desktop version of Lightroom. It can’t sort by star rating, though, and it’s only available to people who subscribe to the Creative Cloud Photography plan (£8.78 per month) or the full Creative Cloud subscription (£46.88 per month).

For Lightroom users on the move, we prefer Photosmith (www.photosmithapp.com). It’s available for iPad only and costs a hefty £14, but its sophistication and attention to detail justify the price. It suffers the same problem of not being able to access memory cards directly, so imports are usually done via the Camera Roll. However, unlike most apps, it supports any RAW format that’s recognised by the iOS operating system. It does this by reading the embedded JPEG rather than the RAW data, but that’s usually enough to get on with cataloguing photos.

^ Photosmith for the iPad is packed with powerful cataloguing tools, and works superbly in conjunction with an Eye-Fi card and Lightroom

Photos are either copied to the app’s own storage or linked to the Camera Roll. However, we found that there isn’t a huge difference to the amount of storage used, as the Linked mode creates full-resolution cached preview files. One clever trick is the ability to use an Eye-Fi card to send photos from the camera straight to the app, bypassing the Camera Roll. If you shoot in RAW + JPEG mode and set up the Eye-Fi card to only transfer JPEGs, you can use these JPEGs to rate and tag photos. Then, when you get home, import the RAW + JPEG files into Lightroom from the card in the normal way, and then sync Photosmith with Lightroom (with the help of the Photosmith plug-in for Lightroom).

This sync process normally transfers photos from Photosmith to Lightroom, along with ratings, colour labels and keyword tags. However, if a photo already exists in the Lightroom catalogue, the synchronisation process applies the metadata to the existing photo. That way, you can effectively catalogue RAW photos on the iPad without having RAW files clogging up the iPad’s internal memory.

Using Photosmith with an Eye-Fi card also means you can rate or tag a photo within a couple of seconds of taking it – perfect for location photo shoots where you might want to check photos on a big screen. Configuring it for use with an Eye-Fi card is quite fiddly, though – you’ll need to follow the instructions on the website very carefully.

Photosmith’s cataloguing tools are as good as they get, with the ability to sort by date, name, rating or colour label, and also to filter by rating, colour label and Lightroom-style Pick and Rejected tags. Photos can be organised into Collections and tagged with keywords, and it all synchronises perfectly with Lightroom. There’s plenty here for people who don’t use Lightroom, too, with export options to Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox and a custom-named iPad Album.