If January is the month to clean out your junk drawers and sock bins, then February is the month to clean up and organize your photos. I don’t mean diving into that shoebox of high school photos under your bed currently serving as a dust bunny magnet. I mean all those weirdly angled selfies, out-of-focus food photos, and blurry snaps of your darling dears.
Now before you click away, hear me out: Digital hoarding is taking its toll on…
- our time (the hours spent searching through thousands of files to find the one we need),
- our wallets (the money spent on bigger and bigger hard drives and cloud storage plans to house everything), and
- our environment (the energy consumed by data storage centers in the form of electricity to keep the servers running and the cooling units to keep them from overheating).
Emails, music, texts, work files, and photos are just a few of the culprits. Today we’re going to focus on those old photos you’ve stocked away.
When taking photos, especially those with fast-moving kids, burst mode can be your friend. But burst mode can also leave you with hundreds of extra images taking up space on your phone and hard drive.
I’m going to give you a challenge: Choose only one or two of your favorite photos from your burst set. Then go ahead and delete the other 50. Seriously — do it. I understand the desire to keep ALL the photos, but I think holding on to just one or two will help you appreciate them more.
Here’s an example of my thought process using six photos. But you can apply this same thought process to many more images.
After a particularly long day that produced many, many dirty dishes and extremely exhausted parents, the kids started running laps around the dinner table. Each time my kids came into the frame I would click, click, click away, taking picture after picture of the same scene.
When I looked back through the pictures there were clearly photos that worked and photos that didn’t work. Out of these six, I easily culled them down to three. Then I took a closer look at those and decided to keep two. The picture on the far right is the best of the set, but the one in the middle is good, too, and includes both kids.
Then, I gave myself permission to delete the four photos that just didn’t work.
Now, you might be thinking, “OK. I see why you don’t need those four extra images above. But are you saying that I don’t need 27,001 photos of my baby making slightly different expressions with his face?”
Yes, that is what I’m saying. Or I’m saying you only need 10. I grabbed this set taken in March 2017 to illustrate my point. In the span of 30 minutes I took roughly 70 photos of my 7-month-old baby sitting and laying down. I am quite certain I don’t need to keep all 70 photos. But let’s take a closer look.
Just by doing a quick first pass, I was able to cut the photos down to half — 34 images. I eliminated all the blurry and out-of-focus ones. But, in my opinion, that’s still way too many photos of my baby simply sitting and smiling.
Let’s take a closer look at a few that are very similar. OK, there are actually SIXTEEN images that are almost identical. Another quick pass got me down to eight. In some cases, I compared two taken just seconds apart and chose one. But let’s keep going. My goal is to get it down to three.
I did it! Out of 34 images, these are the 3 that I toned and cropped. I also put them in a folder labeled “March 2017,” which is nested inside a folder labeled 2017, which is nested inside a folder labeled “Pictures.”
It really is that simple.
And now that I’ve chosen my three pictures, I can share them with friends and family and even print them! Gasp, did I say print?! Yes, please print your pictures. Put them in an album, hang them around the house, or get a new shoebox and fill it with photos so your kids can look through images of themselves. They will love it!
See, photo organization isn’t so hard, is it? Only 100,000 more photos to go!
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