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.