While the beauty of having a camera with us at all times is that we can capture life’s most fun/memorable/funny times, the downside is that we end up with sooo many more photos than we can manage! And then the companies themselves encourage us to keep going by telling us they’ll give us more memory (I’m looking at you, Apple).

Having too many photos and paying for storage is like having a full house and paying for a storage unit. While it seems practical at the time, we often end up paying indefinitely for things we no longer need or even know exist.

To help alleviate this situation, I’ve begun doing a weekly photo review every Sunday. It gives me a chance to back through the photos I collected over the past week, delete the shots I don’t need, cull the series of images back to the best of the set, and generally relive the moments over a cup of coffee.

Here are my top tips for starting your own weekly review practice:

1. Work forwards: Scroll back to the images you took a week ago and start there. As you delete, you are moving closer to the end of the gallery so you will see when you’ve finished. Otherwise it can be daunting to keep going.
2. Delete the Screenshots: I take screenshots regularly of things I want to go back to later. On Sunday, I either revisit those items or add them to my to do list, but either way, I delete them out of my gallery.
3. Best of Set: We often take 2-10 images of the same moment, hoping one of them will be the best of the set, but then we rarely go back and remove the rest. Narrow the set down to the best 1-2 images and delete the others (unless the set itself tells a story).
4. Edit: There are very few photographs ever taken that couldn’t benefit from a touch of editing. Once you’ve gone through your photos from the last week, go back and touchup the ones you’re keeping. This can be as simple as tapping the “magic wand” or as complex as playing with the different settings (more on that in another post). Either way, if these are the photos that mean something to you, take a second to make sure they look their best.
5. Organize: Now that you have the set from the last week, organize the ones you’d like easy access to. Put them in folders if you like, and name one of the folders “Best of YEAR.” This will make it easy to find the images you love most later- whether that’s to show a friend, make a print or decide on images for a holiday card!
6. OVERACHIEVERS ONLY: For those of you who are constant overachievers, here’s your extra credit. Once you’ve finished culling from this past week, grab another cup of coffee (or tea or….?), pick a week (or month) from the past and go back to review those snapshots, as well. It’s usually helpful to work backwards in this case, but it can be so much fun. Go through the same plan as outlined above and make sure you add them to any appropriate folders at the end.

Having a phone full of images is daunting, so take a little at a time. If you set aside time each week, you stop the problem from getting bigger as you go. And, if you can occasionally work backwards, you’re solving the bigger issue at hand, and having fun as you do it.

Happy Photo Reviewing!

PS- If you follow us on social media, we post a weekly reminder on Sundays to cull your photos!