How to Organise Your Photos Better (Without Pressing the Delete Button)

The obvious benefit to having a high-quality camera in our back pockets for, let’s say, sixteen out of twenty-four hours in the day is the fact that we get to take photo after photo, documenting our lives and the people, things, foods, and sights in it. 

The obvious downside to having a high-quality camera in our back pockets for those sixteen hours of the day is, of course, the fact that we end up with photo after photo of every little thing (and non-thing) in our lives.

The sunrise on our usual commute to work? Yep – and in abundance. The flower blooming on the cactus in our bathroom windowsill? Of course – alongside the weird bug we saw on the front steps, our best friend’s baby shower, a funny typo on a sign, that time we went bungee jumping from the Navajo Bridge, a photo of the back of our own heads because we just had to see what was going on round there, and our graduations, weddings, birthdays, Christmases, and Halloweens.

All this to say, there’s a real hodgepodge of content there. It’s incohesive, weird, and, to anyone else but yourself, totally inexplicable. But, ah, such is the tapestry of life…

Should you Delete Old Photos?

No! And here’s why.

Deleting photos, in this day and age, only really serves an aesthetic purpose. Everything heads to the cloud and, whether or not you look at it again once or a thousand times, it stays there pretty happily. The only compelling reason – outside of purging your phone of an ex, which we’re not going to argue you on – is tidying up your camera roll and giving it that streamlined ‘Instagram’ treatment.

And, yes, a ‘disorganised’ camera roll is inexplicable to others. It’s not hashtag-aesthetic or sleek or streamlined, but – and we say this in the nicest possible way – who cares?

Listen. There are ways to get organised, and they don’t involve the delete button. Here are three ways to streamline your photos without binning the weird ones.

1.    Get Your Social Media On Point…

Social media is your opportunity to live out those ‘aesthetic camera roll’ dreams. From your IG grid to your Facebook photo albums, having the ability to cherry-pick the very best pictures of the bunch and put them all alongside one another as if your life is an unbroken stream of beautiful moments is one of the reasons we love social media as much as we do.

We all have a filter on social media (some more than others), so live vicariously through it, and leave that little digital trashcan alone.

2.    …And Use it to Create a Series of Photo books

One of the worst things you can do is leave all your favourite photos to gradually disappear into the internet. Whether they fade into the cloud or get buried under your social media stream, they’re only living half a life if they stay behind the screen.

Creating a photobook straight from your camera roll is tricky. You’ve got to dodge a whole army of useless pictures, funny memes, thumb shots and selfies that will never see the light of day. Creating a photo book from your Instagram, on the other hand, is just about the easiest way to make something beautiful and worth holding onto forever. Taking advantage of those well-curated feeds to create a series of tangible, keep-it-forever books that showcase the very best moments, the best people (from the best angles), and the best photography you’ve achieved.

When you start to see those books filling up your bookshelf, coffee table, or sideboard – however else you choose to display your photo books – you won’t be so concerned about the state of your camera roll.

3.    Take Advantage of Albums

Organising your photos into albums is so simple, you may not have thought of it.

The trouble with our camera roll is that the inexplicability of it all can get confusing, frustrating and, at times, embarrassing. It’s great showing your co-workers the pictures of your new puppy, but what do you do when you swipe too many times and end up with a picture of that weird thing on your big toe?

The solution has been right there under our thumbs this entire time. Taking the time to sort your photos into albums means that your actual, raw camera roll can be a secret between you and the cloud.

Taking advantage of iPhone photo albums is pretty easy – it just takes time. Then again, so does deleting reams of pictures, and we know which one we’d feel better doing…