We carry cameras in our pockets every day, capturing everything from birthday celebrations to our kids’ soccer games and nights out with friends, but often our most precious memories are only ever digital- and even they get lost in the chaos of all the photos on our phones! If you’ve hit a roadblock when you wanted to show someone a photo or tried to find a special moment, this is for you.

As a professional photographer, I want your everyday photos to look and feel as intentional as your professional sessions so you need to curate, organize, and protect your images. Once you get in the habit of curating, it becomes an automatic process and enables you to quickly find the photos you want and love- whether you want to show someone, create a print from it or make a perfect custom gift.

Let’s Get Started!

Step One: Home Sweet Home

The first step is to pick your “home base”- it’s where your photos will live long term. This is a really important step because you not only want to preserve the photos, but you want to have easy access to them, as well, so I recommend one location being on your phone and the second in a cloud-based system.

• iPhone users: iCloud photos or a computer hard drive + Time Machine
• Android users: Google Photos or a computer hard drive + backup
• Amazon: If you are a Prime member, you have free, unlimited photo storage through Amazon
• Tech-comfortable users: A cloud service (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive) + an external hard drive

Step Two: Curate Memory Lane

Step Two is to begin curating. This is the hardest part, but it is also the most rewarding! I recommend setting aside a period of time every Sunday- a minimum of ten minutes- and work backward through your photos. I began by trying to set aside ten minutes each Sunday. In the end, I often kept going far beyond that because I was truly enjoying my walk down memory lane. Here are some key photos to remove:

• Duplicates (we often have multiple shots of the same moment- narrow it down to the very best of the set)
• Blinks & blurs
• Screenshots (move action items to a to-do list; the others need to go!) unless they are in a folder for documents
• Random receipts, documents and memes
• Accidental photos or videos

Note: Don’t overthink each image. If you aren’t in love with it right now, you never will be. Also, once you delete it, most systems will save it for an additional period of time (note- check this before you begin deleting!) so if you delete it and decide you really want to keep it, you can go back and recover it.

Step Three: Feel the Love

As you go through your photos, use the heart button to favorite the images that genuinely matter, such as kids’ highlights, family images, great memories with friends & family, and anything that pulls at your heartstrings. NOTE: Think of the “hearted” photos as your shortlist of favorites for later. These are the images you will later edit, print, and create albums from, etc.

Step Four: Make It Pretty

While cell phones do a really incredible job capturing photos automatically in a variety of lighting conditions, a little editing goes a LONG way towards a perfect shot. At the end of your Sunday session, take a few minutes to edit your recently “hearted” photos. You can first try the “auto” fix button to see if you like that, but if doesn’t create the right look, here is what I recommend:

• Straighten & crop Generally your verticals should be vertical, horizontals should be horizontal
• Remove: Most phones now feature a remove tool. Use it to take out anything distracting (note: these tools are far from perfect. If it doesn’t look right, just leave the distraction in).
• Adjust exposure: Brighten dark photos just enough, pull highlights down if needed
• Adjust color: I usually bring saturation up a touch & vibrance even more (who couldn’t use a little vibrance?!)

Please be wary of using the filters as they can create very dated looks. The one exception to this is the “vivid” filter which sometimes adjusts the exposure & color perfectly on its own so you don’t have to do it manually.

Step Five: Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Now that you have a simple process, you can take advantage of it anytime you’re sitting in the car waiting for your kids or curled up on the couch before bed. Curating your photos does not have to wait for Sunday- but once you establish a habit of the Sunday Session, don’t ever skip that- even if you found 10 minutes in the car earlier in the week- because that is a slippery slope.

The number of photos just keeps going up unless you do something about it, so now is the perfect time to start curating! If you’re interested in diving deeper, please check out my Photo Curation guide available on Etsy. It gives a little more information on the process, as well as apps that can help you with both curation and editing, along with my favorite ideas for printing them out!