If you’ve been watching television recently (hello, March Madness!), you’ve likely seen Apple’s new ad for their iPhone. It is meant to highlight the great storage capacity of the iPhone 15, but instead it just exacerbates an already out-of-control problem.

Do me a favor, pick up your phone right now and take a look at how many photos you have. According to the statistics, the average user has about 3,000 photos on their phone, but my guess is you have more. 1.8 trillion photos (yes trillion- with a T) are taken annually, which translates to about 57,000 every second. Our problem isn’t that we need more photos.

The quote above is from the movie Sabrina. In the movie, Sabrina is taking photographs of a home and asks the homeowner which view he would like her to capture. He says “All of them.” Her response is on point with what we all experience on our phones. More photos don’t make us remember better or enjoy the moments more- on the contrary, too many photos make us less likely to go back and look at the set because it’s overwhelming. In the end, those special moments we were so glad we captured get lost in the middle of all those moments that weren’t. Upgrading to more storage so you can keep all the moments you would otherwise delete is like getting a self storage unit for your memories. How often do people go back and actually look through or even think about the things they have in self storage? For many people, it’s where the extra stuff we’ve collected goes to die.

My primary goal as a photographer is to help you find beautiful ways to tell your story. That doesn’t just mean the photographs I capture for you- they tell part of the story, but they certainly don’t tell it all. To tell the whole story, you need your photographs, as well. Perhaps it’s time to digitize the shoebox of old photos you inherited, to curate the photos on your phone, and then we can start looking at how to print them so your favorite memories fill your life, not your hard drive.

If you’re interested in learning more, go to our website and sign up for our newsletter or download our guide to organizing your photos. We promise, we keep it simple- and we also include a resource list of our three favorite printers.

Now, please, let those bad photos go.