How to Digitally Organize Your Photos

Think back to the last time that you took a photo. Maybe it was 5 minutes ago, or 5 days ago. Did you take just one? Or 4 or 5 just to make sure you got a good one? Now, think back to the last time that you deleted a photo. An accidental screenshot? A ticket for a long gone event? I would guess that you can remember a lot more photo taking than photo deleting. Digital disorganization is easy to ignore until it becomes an expensive burden - we've all seen those alerts that our storage is almost at capacity! Don't click ignore forever. Every photo or video is data that needs to be managed.

While digital photo organizing has become easier with the rise of AI organizing tools and increasingly accurate face recognition, setting up a system that makes sense to you is still an important foundation. Photos represent times in your life, memories with loved ones, and frozen moments in time and history, and you want to be able to access those easily. iCloud Photos, Google Photos, and other photo storage tools offer different kinds of solutions to organize your photos, but there is no magic wand. I personally don't want anyone other than myself making decisions about what photos (and memories) are worth saving.

We are not going to use our SPACE acronym as we usually do in this approach (gasp!). The principles of Sort, Purge, Assign, Contain, and Equalize absolutely still apply.

Choose & Create A Structure

Start your sorting by creating a folder structure in your photo app of choice. Apple Photos allows you to create albums inside of folders, but Google Photos does not. Make sure that you understand the organizing parameters of the photo service that you are using. If you have photos in multiple places, consolidate them! You can always set up backups, but syncing to multiple services is an expensive option if you have a lot of photos.

TIP: If you are consolidating into Apple Photos, be sure to double check your import settings to save the imported images to your iCloud account rather than just to your device.

The structure that you create for your photos depends a lot on what is most important to you, but we always suggest starting with time. Most photo apps are already set up to view your photo library in chronological order. This will save you a ton of time!

What if my photos are not accurately sorted in chronological order?

If you have ever scanned photos, you may have much older photos chronologically placed at the time that you did the scanning (ie. photos from the 1980s are filed with photos from the 2010s). To fix this, you will need to edit the photo's metadata. This is a lot easier than it sounds! The exact process is different depending on your photo software, but you can edit the date and time of the photo to correct the chronology. If you are planning on scanning photos, be sure to account for this correction!

In Apple Photos, I suggest creating Album Folders for each year with albums within for special events throughout the year. You can also create albums across years with favorite photos of family members, friends, or pets, but I wouldn't recommend taking too much time to do this since facial recognition software will be able to do a lot of that work for you! In Google Photos, you can make albums for events but you can't make folders. I suggest naming the album YEAR - Event (ie. 2025 - Holiday Stroll) so that you can very easily sort and find your albums.

Review Your Photos

Now it's time to sort and purge your photos into these newly created folders! As with any quick purging, leave the difficult decisions for later. If you're not sure if you want to keep something, keep it for now and know that you will revisit it later. Agonizing over one image could derail your whole sorting session!

This part takes TIME. There is no way around it. There are also a number of apps out there that make photo review and deletion easier - Swipe & Delete and SwipeWipe are two examples that allow you to swipe one way to delete a photo and another to keep it. This can definitely make the process a bit more fun and allow you to chip away at it over time.

Refine Your Categories

Now that you have reviewed your photo library and deleted what you don't need, you probably have some ideas for some new categories. You can (and should!) create new folders or albums as you go through your photos and find patterns or events that you want reflected in your larger structure. This is our Assign, Contain, and Equalize all at once. As you take more photos over time, you will need to create new albums, delete extraneous images, and move things around. Getting through the backlog is a huge task! Now that you have a system set up it should be much easier to organize your photos moving forward.

Want an example? Here is my personal iCloud Photos library before and after I went through this process. I went from ~180 disparate albums to 18 folders that I can easily navigate! I have found the Projects and Cross-Year album folders to be especially helpful for categories of photos that I regularly revisit and reference.