Thanks to smartphones, people now take over a trillion digital photos each year. Whether you print your pictures or save them digitally, organizing all of them can seem like an impossible task.
However, there are good reasons you might want to organize your family photos. When you can find your photos quickly, it’s much easier to save, share, post, or print them. An organization system ensures those pics you love from that one vacation won’t be buried in the depths of your smartphone or attic, never to be seen again.
Whether your family includes children, significant others, pets, or a group of super-close friends, here’s how to organize those photos, so you can easily access your memories for years to come.
How to Organize Digital Photos
When you think of organizing photos, your mind probably first goes to a pile of glossy prints waiting for a home in a photo album. But for many people today, the vast majority of their photos are on their phone, computer, or online. So, let’s start with how to sort out those digital pics.
Start Deleting Pictures
A good place to start is by changing your photo habits. One of the most helpful practices you can adopt to organize your digital photos is to delete pics regularly.
This doesn’t mean you have to get rid of any images you like. But anytime you take a large set of photos, take a few minutes that same day to look through them and delete the bad ones. Any images that are blurry, unflattering, too dark, or otherwise not worth keeping, you can delete right away, so your phone doesn’t get cluttered with subpar photos.
Anytime you have a few free minutes—such as waiting in a doctor’s office or at the airport—scroll through some of your older photos and delete the bad ones. Reducing the sheer quantity of images you’ve saved makes the rest of them easier to organize.
Use Digital Albums
Your smartphone and computer both let you put photos into albums. Use that tool regularly! Name the albums something specific, such as “Trip to Atlantic City,” and consider adding dates to each one, so you know when it happened.
You can also use albums to organize your photos in any way that feels logical to you. For example, you could give each family member an album on your phone, so you can quickly find a specific photo of that person when you need it. Or, you can organize photos into albums by month and year, so you can easily find an image based on the date.
