Digital Spring-Cleaning: Photos 

It’s that time of year for our (somewhat) annual “Digital Spring-Cleaning” public service announcement. As always, you can revisit all the installments in the series for easy-to-follow tips to tidy up your digital life. Since this is the fifth entry, we have already covered a lot of obvious topics like changing passwords, sorting through your inbox, and updating software. So, in the last couple of posts we have done deep dives into browser clean-up and physically cleaning your devices. This time we are going to tackle the elephant in the room, or rather that picture of an elephant that is blurry, dark, and identical to the fifteen other ones you took but is somehow still on your phone ten years later.   

Photo management is something almost no one does well. So, if you actively suppress an occasional nagging thought that you really need to better organize your photos, you are not alone. The reason seems obvious; most of us have fantastic cameras with us wherever we go, but the ubiquity of cellphones has led to more than just an overload of travel, family, and pet photos. If you look through your camera roll right now you may see things like a scanned document, or a screen shot of a website you want to reference, or the picture of frozen blueberries you texted your wife to make sure they were the ones she wanted. It’s a lot. The good news is that there are improving toolsets at our disposal and some approaches that may make dealing with this technical debt a little easier.  

Top Tips for Spring-Cleaning Photos 

First, a quick disclaimer. There are a lot of things to consider about a photo management system that we are not going to cover here. Getting your photos in the same location so they can be organized in the first place, whether you choose to primarily use apps on your phone or download photos to a computer and use third-party software, and how (and in how many places) you back up your photos are all important things to think about as you look at your own photo management practices. The best methods will be different for different people. These tips are more in the spirit of “Spring-cleaning” to get your arms around a photo library that looks like a teenager’s bedroom. As you interact a little more with your photos you may find you have a renewed interest in dealing with these other issues head on. 

The first tip for tidying anything is always the same – do it often 

Before we get to the fun stuff, the uncomfortable truth is that this will take at least a little work. We all know that but have a hard time doing it. The tools we are about to discuss are great, but constant curation of your library helps nip the problem of photo sprawl in the bud. Something that works for me is to use the same thing that got me into this situation to help get me out of it, which is that I always have my phone with me. That means I can always do a little curation of my most recent photos. For instance, any time I go on a trip that involves a plane ride back, I take part of that time to go through the photos I took on the trip and delete the ones that are duplicative or just bad. Anything done later will be made easier by this. So, next time you find yourself doom-scrolling on a social media app, consider switching over to the photo feed you have already created for yourself and do a little pruning. Getting in the habit of looking at the photos you have just taken helps you stay engaged with the process of cleaning them up.  

AI and organization tools in photos apps have been getting better 

With that first perennial tip out of the way, the fact is that tools for searching and organizing our photos have been getting better and better. You may know that apps like Apple Photos automatically index faces so that you can search for a person, but did you know that now includes pets? Or did you know that it performs optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search for any text that appears in a photo? No matter what ecosystem you use for your photos, the tools have universally improved. So, the flip side of the first tip is that there may be things you can do right now to help you interact more effectively with your photos that don’t require any clean up. For instance, one of the main benefits of a better organized photo collection is the ability to find that photo you know you took but seems lost in the sea of your library. I think most people try to find that photo by scrolling chronologically back through their camera roll, which can be frustrating. However, with the built-in organization of modern photo management software, there is probably a better way to find that photo by searching for a person, place, or item. Instead of tackling your whole photo library, it may make more sense to invest a little time in learning how to use those tools more effectively. (Learn how to search on iPhone, Mac, or in Google Photos.) 

Supercharge photo management with a smarter approach 

If we combine these first two tips, things get interesting. Certainly, you’ll want to stay on top of removing photos that you know are duplicative or bad, but dealing with the remaining photos can still seem daunting. However, in addition to the tools that automatically categorize photos, you can create your own metadata by adding keywords, which enables some extremely efficient organization. This can be a lot faster than trying to physically move photos into different folders or albums and is much more flexible. As an example, THIS blogger has a great system where she uses lightning-fast keyboard shortcuts to apply keywords that act as categories to drive further action (e.g., if the photo stood for a task) or as criteria for smart albums. It is worth watching the video to see just how fast this can be. This culling process requires a little bit of set up, but it pays off by lowering the effort it takes to review our photos while providing a lot of options to leverage that work. It separates the types of photos you have in your library into buckets that are meaningful to you and designed by you to enable the specific actions you think are important. In my opinion, using smart albums to organize your photos in addition to the smart organization features already present in modern photo software transforms the concept of what it means to organize your photos.  

That’s a Wrap 

The set of habits you use to keep your photo collection manageable will likely depend on how serious you are about photography and how you want to enjoy your photos, but we have more tools than ever to help. They are easy to use or maybe already there without you having to do anything. So, don’t overthink it. Like the cellphone in general, the technology that put incredible cameras in all our pockets created a situation that is simultaneously amazing and a little overwhelming. But it has never been easier to preserve beautiful images that may someday spark a distant memory. That may even happen when you go through collection to organize it!