Since the inception of the smartphone, you’ve taken snaps of about a gazillion of photos. The burst photo feature does not make life any easier. Sure, you can choose the prettiest angle from the hundreds of photos the burst feature can produce, but they also quite literally clog your photo album. It’s bad enough that we now live in a world where everything is documented and not savored, but what’s worse is realizing you’re through your third five-terabyte hard drive that is now all full of photos from yesteryears.
It is nice to reminisce. Looking at these photos will remind you where you were and where you are trying to go, or even if you’re in your destination in the first place. Photos have a way of reminding us of the good and the bad, and the stories in-between. They are the most powerful remembrance of your life before today. So, why would you ever want to declutter, delete, clean up, and streamline them?
Recommended: Best Photo Editing Apps for Windows 10
Contents
It Clogs Your Physical and Digital Space
Admit it, the reason that you want to declutter your digital photos is because you have nowhere to store them. While you can buy your nth external hard drive, it just doesn’t make sense to keep on buying them, right? So now, you’re thinking of deleting whole bunches of vacation photos that are so bad you can’t even look at them. Before you go on a deleting spree, remember that there’s one more option you can try: you can subscribe to a cloud backup service.
A cloud backup will still retain your photo files but in very small and minimal size. They won’t even eat up your hard drive. This allows you to access these photos from your smartphones. All your smartphone has to do is download the rest of the file from the cloud and voila, you have a full copy of the photo you want.
Choose Quality Always
There is nothing wrong with deleting bad pictures so go ahead and do it. Always choose quality photos over the number of photos you can save on your phone. If it all looks the same to you, why do you have to keep them? A good trick. Is to delete bad photos as soon as you take them. Take a few seconds of your time after you take a photo to delete the bad ones. Keep only the good ones from now on, so you don’t have to fill up your hard drive or cloud backup with bad pictures.
Delete Photos You Don’t Need
Like many, you’ve saved and screencapped photos on your social media feed and internet for whatever reason. For most, the photos of great-looking houses serve as an inspiration. These are your pegs for your own house, for example. However, when was the last time you looked at these photos? Have you ever revisited them in the past year?
If no, that means you have no use of them. Whether or not your preferences have changed doesn’t matter. The point is that screencaps you haven’t revisited in the past year have no use to you now. It’s the same rule with clothes and shoes. Give away those you haven’t used in a year.
Build Folders
The best way to organize your digital photos is to put them in folders. This trick will make them easily accessible. You can also find the photos and files easier this way. For example, you can put all the recipes you screencapped in your “recipes” folder while your photos of your kids can be categorized by name and month/year. If there are particular places you have visited, that’s another reason to start a folder. Your storage will look like a digital filing cabinet but who cares? That’s exactly how you should organize your photos.
Start a Routine
You can only keep up with an organized digital storage if you start a routine. What’s a routine in terms of digital storage? First, you have to delete bad photos right after you take them. Second, you have to add that photo to an existing folder or make a new one for it. Third, you have to back up your digital photos to make sure they won’t be accidentally deleted. And lastly, set a schedule when you will revisit your digital photos for a declutter.
How many photos are on your phone right now? They’re probably all important, but not as important as the photos you are yet to take. Optimize the little space you have in your phone and find a way to maximize whatever space you can afford.