Taking photos on a smartphone is easy. Perhaps too easy. Your favorite photos quickly get lost in a sea of screenshots and blurry images. Camera Rolls are messy, and once you’re a couple thousand photos deep, it’s hard to know where to start organizing.
We’re going to show you how to get your digital photos in order and keep them that way, so you can find and enjoy your wonderfully nostalgic photos, whenever you want.
Delete Blurred and Duplicate Images
This is the best place to start, as it involves the least amount of decision making. You’re not culling your images, just streamlining so you don’t have duplicates or blurred shots. The culling happens later 🙂
With a little automatic magic, apps can locate and delete blurry and duplicate images. Check out these apps for Android and iOS.
Delete Screenshots
Screenshots are usually handy for a day or two – and then very quickly redundant. Delete screenshots from your iPhone by navigating to:
Photos > Media Types > Screenshots
On Android, you can head to:
Gallery > Screenshots
Only keep what you need and consider moving important information to a notes app, such as Evernote for iOS and Android, Ulysses for iOS or your built in notes application. If you have ideas you want to save, try Pinterest.
Choose Your Favorites
Now it’s time to cull. You can approach this one of two ways:
The Easy Way: Select photos you wish to delete and delete them
The Hard Way: Select photos you wish to keep and delete everything else
Whichever you choose, keep as many photos as you wish. After all, the benefit of having digital photos is the almost unlimited storage options.
You can use Slidebox to manage photos with swipe gestures. Delete, compare and sort photos with a swipe. It’s available on iOS and Android.
Albums
Now your photos have been culled and streamlined, it’s time to put them in their appropriate folders. Consider dedicated albums for events and locations, such as:
- Birthdays
- Holidays
- Vacations
- Family occasions
- Home
- Work
- Traveling
For bigger events, you can create a standalone album. For example:
- Katie’s 21st Birthday
- Florida 2019
- Thanksgiving at Mum’s 2018
- WWDC 2019
- Anna’s 40th Birthday Party
- My Birthday Trip to Hawaii 2017
Don’t forget to share albums with friends and family, who can add their own photos from events. Here’s more on album sharing for iOS,Android, or Lightroom for the professional amature.
Set Rules
Now your photos are in order, you want to keep them that way. Set rules for your photos. Schedule a weekly review to delete, sort and manage any photos taken that week. Serial snappers might want to do this at the end of every day.
To work a little automation magic into your photo organization, iPhone users: try using Siri Shortcuts to create rules to move, manage and organize your photos.
Now you’ve got all your photos nicely sorted and categorized… what to do with them?
Display
Don’t forget to showcase your favorite photos. They may look neat and organized in your newly created folders, but if displaying them in your home will bring you joy, consider having them printed.
Online services such as Snapfish allow you to print photos from your phone as individual prints, photobooks and more. For a more minimal look, Fracture print photos directly onto glass.
Faster options include printing your photos at Walmart or buying photo paper so you can print photos at home and pin them straight to the fridge.
Other Ways to Enjoy Your Photos
- Phone wallpaper (lock screen and background)
- Desktop wallpaper
- Social Media: Profile pictures, banner images etc
- Holiday cards
- Gift relatives over the holidays with printed photo books
- Uploading to Flickr or other photography websites
- Upload to a CC0 photography site such as Pexels so others can use your great sunset shots
Your Digitial Photo Organization Checklist
- Delete blurry and duplicate images
- Delete unused screenshots
- Choose photos you want to keep/delete
- Create folders
- Share with loved ones
- Schedule a review to delete unwanted photos
- Create rules for photos using Siri Shortcuts
- Decide if there are any images you’d like displayed in your home and have them printed
- Update any online profiles with new images
- Consider uploading your shots to photography sites for others to use
What You Can Do Today?
Check out your last month of photos on your break, delete blurry photos, duplicates and screenshots, so you’re only left with the good stuff.
Tell Us How You Organize Your Photos
How do you keep your digital photos organized? Let us know @TextExpander and in our group on Facebook.
Comments and Discussion