Building Albums by Month and Event
Okay so last time we got a naming system going that isn't overthought, and hopefully your folders are starting to have actual names instead of just "IMG_" and a string of numbers.
Today we're building on that. This is where you take those named folders and turn them into albums you can actually find things in later. Roberta from the ward asked me about this exact thing once, how'd I sorted the Relief Society activity photos so fast, and I ended up talking her ear off for twenty minutes about naming conventions. This is basically that conversation, but organized.
Month folders first
Sooo the base layer of this whole system is just months. Not weeks, not days, months. That's it.
On an iPhone, your Photos app already sorts by date automatically in the "Years" and "Months" tabs, so honestly some of this work is done for you. What we're adding is albums, which is where you pull specific photos out and group them by what they actually are.
To make one: open Photos, tap the plus sign in the top corner, choose New Album, and name it something like "2024 March" or "March 2024," whichever order you like, just pick one and stick with it for the whole year. I do year first because it sorts better alphabetically later. That's a personal preference, not a rule.
On Android it's basically the same idea in Google Photos. Tap Library, then Albums, then the plus sign, New Album. Name it the same way.
Event folders on top of that
Months are your skeleton. Events are what actually makes an album useful.
So inside March, maybe you've got a birthday, a trip up the canyon, and a random Tuesday where you took forty pictures of the dog for no reason. You don't need a "random Tuesday dog" album (though I feel like some of you want one). But the birthday probably deserves its own album, separate from the month.
Here's how I do it. Big one-time events, like a wedding, a baptism, a trip, get their own named album: "Skylar Baptism 2024," "Lake Powell Trip 2024." Regular stuff, the day to day, just lives in the month folder and I don't fuss over it further.
That's the whole trick. Not everything needs its own album. If you try to make an album for every single thing that happened, you'll burn out by February and never touch it again. Ask me how I know (2019 is still sitting there unfinished, August onward, I got tired and just stopped).
Shared albums for family stuff
This next part I actually didn't figure out first. My daughter Audrey did.
I was still fumbling around trying to decide how to organize cousin photos when Audrey just went in, made a shared album, and added all the cousins as collaborators so everyone could drop their own pictures into one place. I stood there kind of proud and kind of useless, honestly. She was faster at it than I was.
If you want to try that: in Photos, when you make a new album, there's a share icon, tap it, then Invite People, and you can send a link to anyone in the family. They don't even need an iPhone to see it or add to it, which surprised me. Google Photos has the same feature under Shared Albums, and it works across Android and iPhone both, which is nice because families are never all one type of phone.
This is genuinely great for things like a big family reunion, or a grandkid's whole first year, where you want everyone contributing instead of forty separate camera rolls with the same photos.
A word on not overthinking this
I feel like people get stuck here trying to build the perfect system before they start, and then they never start. You don't need twelve categories. You need months as your backbone, event albums for the stuff that really matters, and shared albums for family things where other people are taking pictures too.
One system, done okay, beats three systems done perfectly. I've watched people try to set up a folder structure so detailed they need a legend to understand it, and six months later they're back to just dumping everything in camera roll because the system was too much work to maintain. Keep it boring. Boring is what lasts.
A caution
If you're using shared albums with kids or extended family, double check who you've invited before you fill it with photos. Once someone's added, they can usually see everything already in there, not just what gets added after. Takes ten seconds to check the collaborator list, worth doing.
Before next time
Pick one month from this year and actually build it out, month folder plus at least one event album inside it. Doesn't have to be perfect, just enough to see how it feels.