Doing One Year at a Time (and Stopping Before You Get Bored)
Okay so last time we built albums by month and event, and hopefully some of you have a few real ones started. Today I want to talk about pace, because I feel like this is the part where people either burn out or just quit halfway through.
Here's the thing. You are not going to organize eight years of photos in one weekend. I tried. It doesn't work, and honestly if it did work I'd be suspicious of you.
Why one year at a time
Sooo the trick here is picking a single year and only working on that year. Not "let me organize my whole camera roll." One year. That's it. Everything else stays exactly where it is, untouched, and that's fine.
I do this because Inez, my mother-in-law, once asked me for the temple photos from her and Travis's wedding. She wanted them printed for her wall. Simple request. Except I could not find them. They were in there somewhere, I knew it, but they were buried under something like eleven thousand screenshots and duplicate sunsets and I spent an hour scrolling and getting more annoyed by the minute. That's the day I decided I needed an actual system, not just good intentions.
If I'd tried to fix my whole camera roll that same week I think I would've given up by Wednesday. Instead I picked one year. Then another one later. It's slower, but it's the kind of slow that actually finishes stuff instead of the kind of slow that never starts.
How to actually do it
- Open your Photos app and go to whatever view shows you by year. On iPhone it's the Years tab at the bottom. On Android it depends on your phone a little, someone in the room can probably help if you're stuck (I'm shakier on Android, I'll say that upfront).
- Pick the oldest year you've got real stuff in. Not necessarily the very first year on your phone, if that's mostly random screenshots from when you first got the phone. Pick a year that actually has photos you care about.
- Scroll through just that year. Delete the obvious junk as you go. Blurry ones, the sixth attempt at the same shot, screenshots that snuck back in.
- Sort what's left into your month or event albums, the ones we set up last time.
- When you feel yourself getting bored or annoyed, stop. I mean it. Close the app. You can come back to it.
That last step is the one people skip and it's the one that matters most.
An honest confession about my own 2019
I spent a full evening once organizing 2019 into monthly folders. Got through January all the way to about halfway through August, feeling pretty good about myself, and then I just hit a wall. I was bored. My brain was done. So I closed it out and left the rest of 2019 sitting there, unsorted, for about two weeks.
That's just how my energy works on this stuff. I'm not going to pretend I'm some disciplined person who finishes every project start to finish in one sitting. I'm not. I get through as much as I've got in me that day, and then I stop, and I come back later. The photos aren't going anywhere. They're backed up now (that's the whole point of this class), so there's no rush.
I feel like people put this pressure on themselves that organizing has to happen all at once or it doesn't count. It doesn't have to. A little bit today, a little bit next week, and eventually you've got years done without ever having a miserable all-nighter over it.
A caution while you're deleting
Just double check before you delete a whole chunk of photos that your backup actually finished uploading first. If you're not sure, wait a day, check your cloud storage from a computer or another device, confirm the photos are really there, and then delete off your phone. It only takes one bad experience of deleting something that hadn't backed up yet to make you paranoid forever, and I don't want that for you.
Where to stop for today
Pick one year. Just one. Get through what you can, and when you're bored, you're done for the day. That's a completely acceptable place to leave it.
Before next time
Try to get at least one full year sorted into its month and event albums before we meet again, even if it takes you a few short sessions to get there.