5 Steps to Organize your Phone Photos

My iphone has over 10,000 photos on it. And those photos automatically sync with my computer. Now my computer is telling me I’ve run out of room. So today we’re going over 5 steps to organize your phone photos using the same system I use to organize my professional photos. After all when it comes to my professional photos I have a system down pat. Obviously, I haven’t implemented that into my personal photos. This is kind of tragic if you think about it because those photos are the ones that are most important to me!

I’m expecting this to take several hours, so if you have to do it in pieces that’s totally okay!

1. Start with the Screenshots

This is the best place for me to start because I take a LOT of screenshots. Right now I have 2,524 screenshots on my phone. Most of them are pieces of information I wanted at some point. So I’m sure I’ll want to save some of that information! Grab a notebook or journal and be prepared to take notes! If that’s too much of a task right now simply delete the screenshots you don’t want to keep and leave the keepers in the screenshot album. (I’ll get more into albums in the next bullet point!) Pro-tip start with your oldest screenshots. Those will be the ones you’re most likely to get rid of! 

Some of the screenshots I found that I DEFINITELY don’t need anymore included:

• My work schedule from LUSH from 2017 (there were a lot of these)
• Screenshots from Pinterest for hair colors
• Photos of google maps directions (I’m paranoid that I’ll lose data and get helplessly lost)
• JoAnns coupons from my email
• Literally hundreds of accidental screen grabs from my lock screen

Some of the screenshot I chose to keep:

• Photos of our cats as teeny tiny kittens
• Quotes that inspired me
• Photos I actually wanted to remember

The Notes I took:

• Books I want to read
• Photo Location
• Travel tips

On the first pass through I deleted 2,098 screenshots! Seriously WOW! The ones I didn’t delete the thumbnails were either too small for me to see what it really was or I wanted to organize it differently! But it was definitely the first win I needed to keep going!

2. Create Albums for Organization

The idea of organizing your phone photos isn’t to just delete all the photos that you have! It’s to get them to a point where you could quickly and easily find the photos you want. So I’m taking my album system from my pro photos into my personal photos! You’re going to want to create albums for the kind of photos you take most. If you take a lot of photos of your kids make an album with each child’s first name. If you want to make a photo book for grandparents at the end of the year create an album for that!

My albums are:

• Photo Inspiration
• Quotes
• My portfolio
• Myself
• Me and JT
• Photos of the house
• Family
• Friends
• Travel photos organized by trip
• Disney

You can break it down further and create albums by date or event as well! As you’re moving photos into albums you can use this opportunity to pick which ones are your favorites! Don’t move the photos with closed eyes or that are blurry! It’s okay to take your time with this! One month at a time is a natural way to break it up.

3. Back Them Up!

This one is really easy with iCloud because it happens automatically. But you can also use other services like dropbox or google photos! This keeps your favorite photos safe! Better yet print them! There are TONS of apps that let you print directly from your phone. I personally like groovebook. The images aren’t high quality, but they give me an easy way to have my photos be tangible!

4. Create a Routine

I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted! It took me about 6 hours to go through all my images. That’s literally a full days work! So now we’re going to be proactive about organizing in the future! If you don’t have the time to organize your photos as you take them that’s okay! We have a plan.

• Weekly – Move your photos into the corresponding albums and delete any photos that you don’t love!
• Monthly – Back up your photos to the cloud (you can also set this up to happen automatically)
• Yearly – Create a photo book to share with your family or to keep for yourself to look back on! My personal favorite place to order photobooks is Artifact Uprising

5. Share your Photos

You did all the work to create a beautiful system! Celebrate that by sharing some of your favorites on social media! An easy way to do that is to heart images while you’re creating the albums that you absolutely adore! Here are a few of my favorites from the archive!