What Do I Do With All My Digital Photos?

I have 10,000 pictures on my phone. How do I get that number down so I can actually find what I am looking for?

The problem you’re having is a common one. I read somewhere that the average number is 2,500.

William Katerberg is the curator of Heritage Hall, the archives for Calvin University, Calvin Theological Seminary, and the Christian Reformed Church in North America. When we were preparing to move the denomination’s offices from a very large space to a much smaller space, Will advised us to leave documents in chronological order as they tell a more complete story when left in order.

Fortunately, the systems that manage our digital photo files (Google Photos, Apple Photos) automatically keep images organized by date. In time, AI will do much more sorting for us, but I don’t think it’ll get so smart that we’ll want it to delete all the photos it predicts we won’t ever need. We still need to do our part.

My mom, a widow, died a little more than a year ago, and I volunteered to be the first of my siblings to take possession of the four large boxes of photo albums, loose photos, and slide transparencies to sort through and take what my family wanted before passing it on to the next. I wasn’t sure where to start, and the task was made more difficult with the mix of emotions these images represented. I finally made my way through, and from that experience have these suggestions for helping manage our physical and digital pictures:

• Any bad or blurry photos should be trashed immediately.
• Get rid of duplicates or near-duplicates.
• Think about these images telling a story. Unless it’s a story about food, your children or grandchildren are unlikely to be interested in what you ate every day. They are more likely to be interested in what your whole life looked like. What did your house/yard/church/town look like? How did you spend your time? Who did you hang out with?
• In addition to close-ups of your kid and his birthday cake, you might also take a wide shot to capture what your dining room looked like at the time.
• Keep your sorting system simple. It’s tempting to get too organized, but if your system is not quick and easy, you’ll soon tire of it and stop. I’d suggest tagging your images instead. Search online for how your photo manager of choice handles tagging.
• Create a ‘dump later’ folder for those images you’re not sure whether to keep or get rid of. Once motivated, you don’t want indecision to get in the way of progress!

If you live in the northern hemisphere, the grey days of winter are the perfect time to do some digital housekeeping and establish a system for keeping your picture inventory to a reasonable level.