LapHow to use these guides
Each guide is a short, practical walkthrough for one job: cleaning up duplicates, organizing a large library, or setting up a private collection that never touches the cloud. They are written for the folder-first workflow Lap uses, but most of the steps apply to any local photo manager, so you can follow them before you install anything.
Read one at a time. Photo organization usually goes wrong when you try to fix everything in a single weekend and end up with two half-finished structures. Pick the problem that is actually bothering you, work through it, and stop. The topics below cover the situations people run into most often, from a first import to a long-overdue cleanup.
Where to start
| If you want to | Start with |
|---|---|
| Bring order to a messy collection | How to organize thousands of photos |
| Handle a library over 100,000 files | How to organize a large photo library |
| Free up disk space | How to find and remove duplicate photos |
| Deal with RAW files without a catalog | How to organize RAW photos |
| Find photos by describing them | How to search photos by description |
| Keep everything off the cloud | How to organize photos without the cloud |
A workflow that holds up
Whatever tool you use, the same few habits keep a library tidy over the years.
- Pick one folder structure and stick to it. Year, then event, is the usual choice, because it survives a rename and still makes sense in a file manager.
- Import in batches and let indexing run in the background instead of watching it.
- Tag and rate as you go, so a shortlist for culling already exists when you need it.
- Run a duplicate pass before you move anything, not after, or you will clean the same files twice.
- Back up the catalog alongside the photos, so the organization survives a disk failure.
- Do the important renames and moves inside the app, so grouped files such as RAW and JPEG pairs stay together.
The goal is not a perfect library. It is a library you can find one specific photo in, months later, without guessing which folder you put it in.
If you are weighing a local setup against a cloud one, the guide on local versus cloud photo management lays out the trade-offs. Once you have a plan, the features page shows which tools in Lap support it, and you can download Lap to run the steps on your own library.