Photos, and the Folder Named New Folder (3)
Okay so. We've done Downloads, we've done the desktop, we've got two folders beating twenty and plain-word names on all of them. Good bones. Today we're doing the thing everybody's actually been dreading a little, which is photos.
I want to say up front... photos are different from your other files. Taxes and car stuff, you've got maybe a few hundred documents over your whole life. Photos, you've got thousands. Maybe tens of thousands if you've had a phone for ten years and you're a person who takes a picture of your dinner sometimes. So the system has to be simpler than everything else we've built, not fancier. That part trips people up.
The mistake I made, so you don't have to
When I built my first folder system, I loved it for about four days. Then I needed a receipt for a return at Costco and I could not find it to save my life. Turned out I'd filed it somewhere that made perfect sense to me at eleven o'clock at night and meant nothing to me the next morning. That's the whole risk with photos especially, because you will be tired when you're doing this, and tired-you makes folder names that awake-you can't decode a week later.
So here's the rule for photos: fewer folders than you think you need, and names so plain they're almost boring.
What that actually looks like
Don't do this by year, and don't do this by event, at least not at first. That's how you end up with forty folders and no idea which one has the Lake Powell trip. Instead:
- One big folder called "Photos." That's it. That's folder number one.
- Inside it, maybe a handful of folders for the stuff that's genuinely huge and separate — "Kids" if you've got a lot of kid-specific stuff, "Angela's photos" was mine, because that's a real category in our house. Not "Angela's photos - edited - to sort - 2019 batch." Just Angela's photos.
- Everything else stays loose in the big Photos folder, or in a folder named for what it actually is. "Reunion 2024." "House before we remodeled." Words you would search for at eleven at night, tired, half paying attention. That's the test. Always.
Does that make sense so far... the goal isn't a beautiful filing cabinet. The goal is that six years from now, half-asleep, you type "reunion" into the search bar and it's just there.
Now, the folder that gives this lesson its name
Here's the thing though. Almost everybody who's had a computer for more than a few years has a folder somewhere called "New Folder" or "New Folder (2)" or "New Folder (3)." It happens because your phone or your photo app auto-creates a folder when you plug something in or import something, and it just... never gets a real name. It sits there. Multiplies, sometimes. Nobody opens it because nobody remembers what's in it or why they'd want to.
I need you to open those folders before you do anything else today. Not delete them. Open them.
Because here's what happened at my house. Angela thought she'd lost eleven years of photos when an old phone died on her. Eleven years. We looked everywhere, checked every backup we could think of, and she was pretty broken up about it, understandably. I finally found them sitting in a backed-up folder that nobody had opened in years, buried inside — I promise I'm not making this up for the lesson — a folder literally named "New Folder (3)." She cried a little when I pulled it up. I don't tell that story lightly, and I don't skip it, because it's the whole reason I care about this so much. The photos weren't gone. They were just wearing a name that told us nothing.
Your job today
- Search your computer for "New Folder" and see what comes up. Open every result.
- For anything with real photos in it, drag it into your main Photos folder, or into a plain-word folder if it's clearly its own thing — a trip, a kid, a house.
- If it's genuinely empty or genuinely junk, fine, get rid of it. But look first. Always look first.
- Rename anything vague. If a folder's called "Camera Roll export 2" and it's actually your daughter's second birthday, call it that.
One more thing, since we're on photos
Don't feel like you have to sort every single photo into its own perfect little category. That's the trap. My opinion, and I say this a lot: the best system is the one you'll actually keep, not the pretty one. A big Photos folder with search doing the heavy lifting beats five hundred meticulously labeled folders that took you a weekend and that you'll never touch again. Search beats sorting. We covered that a couple lessons back and it goes double here.
Before next time
Find your New Folders. All of them. You don't have to sort everything inside them today, just get them out of hiding and into the light where search can actually find them. 👍