How to cull your personal photos easily & quickly
One of my passions as a photographer is memory keeping and creating tangible items that embody your precious moments in time for years to come. This is where The Story Keeper stemmed from, this continual series explores all areas of creating, preserving, organising and maintaining your own family story // Bec Zacher
If you have thousands of images on your phone and hard drives and you have never dug into them and gone on a ruthless image declutter, now is the time!
Before you even start the process of organising your images so that you can create photo books and print photos regularly, you need to do a serious spring clean of your images. Your future self will thank you immensely if you make this a regular habit once a month. The more you put off culling your images, the bigger the task looms and can seem too overwhelming to even start.
7 tips for tackling the process of culling your personal images ~
01 ~ Sort and favourite your images right away
Every time you pick up your phone and take a bunch of images, get into the habit of whittling down those images straight away. If you took 18 pics of that cute moment your bub was covered in spaghetti, don’t hold on to them all. Mindfully curate the best images that tell the story of the moment, favourite those images with the little heart icon. The images you ‘favourite’ will automatically be added to your Favourites folder.
ALTERNATE OPTION > Take images within a photo app on your phone, such as VSCO Camera+ or Lightroom Mobile (what I use). You can then choose your favourite shots, edit them right in the app and save them to your main camera roll. This saves time, gives you a lot more control when you take the image and speeds up the editing process.
02 ~ Embrace the delete button
Now that you have a folder of your favourite images, go through your camera roll and select all the images without a heart and delete them. You can do this in bulk quickly by pressing the ‘Select’ button at the top right and swiping and selecting multiple images at once and then deleting them.
Now go to ‘Albums’ and then the ‘Recently Deleted’ folder where you can permanently delete all the images you have culled and free up lots of phone space!
HELPFUL TIP > If you are using iCloud and all your images are being synced to all your devices, you can actually organise all your images on your desktop computer. I find this really helpful as you can view larger images and organise easily into your albums in bulk. All changes that you make on your desktop computer will sync with your phone. (Check out Tip 6 if you would like to set up iCloud).
Does anyone else have a phone full of selfies their child has taken? :) Pretty hilarious finding these on my scroll but if I kept them all I would have some serious storage issues!
03 ~ CULL IN INCREMENTS
Trying to tackle years worth of phone images and other images you have taken is a mighty big task and way too much to tackle at once. Set yourself small goals, like one event at a time, one month at a time or a year worth of mobile images at a time.
Grab a pen and paper and job down a list of what you have culled so you can tick it off when it’s done and keep on track with where you’re at.
I had a backlog of thousands and thousands of mobile phone images. I jumped into my Photos app on my Mac and created Yearly folders for my personal images and dumped every personal image into the relevant yearly folder. (I use iCloud so all these folders sync to my mobile phone). Whenever I had a spare 30 minutes I went through each yearly folder, favourited all my favs with the heart icon and deleted the rest. Breaking it down into these folders made a mammoth task far more manageable! Now I have yearly folders will all my favourite images and I’ve been able to easily create photo books from these folders.
04 ~ USE A PHOTO APP ON YOUR PHONE TO SHOOT AND EDIT MORE THOUGHTFULLY
Take images within a photo app on your phone, such as VSCO Camera+ or Lightroom Mobile (what I use). You can then choose your favourite shots, edit them right in the app and save them to your main camera roll. This saves time, gives you a lot more control when you take the image and it means you are only saving the best images to your camera roll.
Save the camera app that you regularly use (such as VSCO, Camera+ or Lightroom) to the main screen on your phone so you can quickly access it when you want to take a picture.
05 ~ Select the great images rather than trying to delete the bad
I recommend going through your images and choosing the ones you love rather than mulling over the ones you think you should delete. Quickly scroll through your images and heart/star the ones that jump out at you and if you have a ton of images of an exact moment, choose your one or two favourites and be done with the rest.
Choose images that make you feel something and capture the moment really well. Let go of only choosing perfect moments or technically perfect images.
06 ~ Shoot with intention
Every time you pick up your camera or are documenting an event or something happening in your life, think about where those images will end up. Do you really need 50 angles of Macey blowing out the candles on her cake or could you take a couple of really thoughtful images that capture the moment well and then put your camera away?
Back in the days of film, we had to be far more intentional with the images that we took, whereas now we fire off hundreds of shots in minutes without much thought. Next time you pick up your camera, think about what you will do with your images and shoot for this purpose. In my yearly family photo books, I usually dedicate a two page spread to most events, such as a birthday or family outing. This means I might only use between 3-8 images on this double spread. Knowing that this is where my images will end up and having this constraint of only a handful of images actually helps me shoot far more intentionally.
07 ~ Set up a regular plan
If you have a simple plan that you follow to regularly to go through and organise your images it will take away from the overwhelm that comes with the build-up. It will also equip you to easily create tangible memories like prints and photo books straight from your phone.
Each week ~ go through and favourite your images and then delete the rest.
Each month ~ go into your favourites and add these images into albums and back up through your chosen service.
Tackle the backlog ~ start small. Set yourself a goal to tackle one previous year of images each month. Select the earliest year of images on your phone / hard drive and start there. Go through and bulk select the duplicates, missed shots, and the curate the rest and delete!
Questions? + Join the Story Keeper Community
I really hope that you have found this helpful and gleaned some tips for yourself that you can start implementing today! I know you might have questions so come join the Story Keeper Private Facebook group where we all chat and share tips together and make sure you come join the Story Keeper Instagram community as well.