Deleting the 396 Sunsets: It's Okay to Not Keep Everything
Okay so we're deep into sorting now, and I need to say this part out loud because I watch people freeze up every single class when we get here.
You do not need to keep every photo you've ever taken.
I feel like this is the hardest thing for people in this room to hear. There's this guilt, like deleting a photo means you didn't value the moment, or you're throwing away a piece of your kid's childhood. I get it. But at some point the guilt is just making your camera roll unusable, and an unusable camera roll means you can't find the one photo you actually need when Grandma asks for it.
So let me tell you about the sunsets, because this is the example I always come back to.
The 396 sunsets
A while back I was going through old photos from our backyard, and I hit a folder with something like 400 pictures of the same sunset over the point of the mountain. Same evening. Same sky. My phone had apparently decided that every four seconds was a good moment to grab another shot, and I never went back and cleaned it out.
I sat there and looked at all 400 of them side by side and I could not tell you a real difference between most of them. So I deleted 396 and kept four. Four sunsets. That's it.
And I want to be clear, I don't feel bad about that. I stand by that number. Nobody needs 400 pictures of a sunset, not even a really good sunset, not even one over the point of the mountain which, fine, is a nice view. Four is plenty. Four is honestly probably still too many.
Why this matters for your sorting
Here's the thing about sorting years of old photos. If you're trying to keep everything, sorting becomes impossible, because you're not actually organizing, you're just relocating a mess from one folder to a bunch of smaller folders. Keeping everything means you can't find anything. That's just true.
So as you go through old years, month by month, here's what I want you to do.
Look for the burst sequences first. These are the easy wins. Anytime your phone fired off five or ten shots in a row, of a sunset, a kid blowing out candles, a dog doing something cute, pick your favorite one or two and delete the rest. Don't agonize. If you can't tell the difference in two seconds of looking, delete it.
Look for the near-duplicates. Same shot, slightly different angle, nobody blinking in one versus the other. Keep the best one. You genuinely will not miss the other three.
Look for the photos that don't mean anything to anyone. A blurry shot of the inside of your purse. A picture of a receipt you already dealt with (we talked about screenshots living separate from your photos a couple lessons back, but sometimes an actual photo of a receipt sneaks in too). A picture of the TV screen because you were trying to remember a show title. Gone. Nobody's grandkid is going to want that one.
A word on doing this without losing your mind
I want to be honest, this part is tedious. It just is. I'm not going to pretend scrolling through 2016 photo by photo is fun. What helps me is doing it in short chunks, one month at a time, and not trying to make it perfect. You are not curating a museum exhibit. You're just trying to get your folders down to a size where you can actually find things.
And a real caution here, not a scary one, just a practical one: once you delete a photo and empty it out of your "Recently Deleted" folder (both iPhone and most Android photo apps have one of these, it holds deleted photos for about 30 days as a safety net), it's gone. So don't rush the emptying-out part. Delete freely, but let that folder sit for a few weeks before you go in and clear it for good, just in case you change your mind on something.
One more thing
If you're really nervous about deleting something you might regret, here's a trick. Move it to a folder called something like "Maybe Delete Later" instead of deleting it outright. Come back to that folder in six months. I promise you, most of what's in there you won't even remember taking, and deleting it then will feel a lot easier than it does right now.
That's basically the whole opinion of this lesson: keeping everything isn't the safe choice, it just feels like it. The safe choice is a system you can actually use, and that means letting some sunsets go.
Before next time: pick one old month from your camera roll, thirty photos or fewer to start, and see if you can get it down by half. That's the whole assignment. Half.