How to Keep Your Photo Library Organised for Good

An organised library saves space, but it also saves time. When the best photos are easy to find, you share them more, print them more and enjoy them more. A library with twenty thousand unsorted pictures hides the good ones behind the throwaway ones.

Tidiness also makes backups smaller and faster, and it makes a phone move or repair far less stressful because there is less to transfer.

Pick a day each month and open your most recent pictures. Delete the obvious throwaways straight away: accidental shots, near-identical retakes, screenshots you no longer need. Mark the pictures you love as favourites. That is the whole routine, and because the pile is only a month deep it takes minutes.

Pair it with a quick look at your phone’s storage screen. If photos and videos are growing faster than you expect, you will notice early rather than when the phone says it is full.

Most people need only a handful of albums: perhaps family, trips, projects and documents. Search and date sorting do the rest. Complicated folder structures look neat for a week and then fall out of use, so choose the smallest system you will actually follow.

Receipts, tickets and photos of whiteboards are best kept together in a documents album, so they do not clutter your memories and are easy to delete later when they are no longer useful.

For a first big tidy, use the photo cleaner to see where the clutter is. It groups similar photos, ranks blurry ones by a sharpness score and lists screenshots. You review the suggestions and decide. Everything is analysed in your browser, so the photos stay on your device.

After the first pass, you only need to scan again after a trip, an event or a few months of heavy use.

Whenever you are about to delete a lot at once, check that your best photos exist somewhere else first. Our guide to backing up photos before deleting explains a simple two-copy approach that works for most people.