Diane recently asked if I use photos John has taken in our photobooks. You know I can take a simple question and turn it into (checks WordPress stats) an 866 word post!
100% yes!! He is an incredibly talented photographer, and our photobooks would be a pale shadow of their current selves without his photos.
We have a pretty natural “division of labour” when it comes to pictures. John tends to photograph things; I tend to photograph people. There’s overlap, of course, but generally speaking: if it’s a person, I took it. If it’s a beautiful landscape or an architectural wonder, John did. (That said, he is far better at capturing selfies of the two of us than I am.)
We take a lot of photos. And yes, managing them can feel like a lot. I’ve been using the same organizational method for almost a decade, so I figured I might as well document it for the blog.
STEP ONE: TAKE PHOTOS
I know I’ve written about this before (possibly in an Ask Me Almost Anything post?), but for reference all our photos are taken on iPhones.
I have an iPhone SE (basically an iPhone 8 with a few extra bells and whistles). John is currently on a work call so I can’t confirm this, but I think he has an iPhone 14?
So nothing too fancy, just phones we typically have with us.
STEP TWO: SELECT WHAT PHOTOS TO KEEP
Did I mention I take a lot of pictures? Enough that almost every day I take a minute or two to scroll through that day’s photos and decide what’s worth keeping.
Often I’ll take a dozen shots of the same thing (especially action shots—for example, kids going over jumps at the sledding hill). I look through and heart/favourite the one(s) I like best.
Then I delete everything else.
Once I’m down to just the hearted photos, I’ll sometimes do a second pass—if I hearted a few similar shots, this makes it easier to compare them side-by-side and choose the best one.
The screenshot below is quasi-staged because I had already gone through and done my hearting/deleting process (so, for example, the photo in the top center with all the kids standing with sleds: there were three photos of that pose and in two of the three, Belle had her eyes closed). For the purposes of demonstration, just imagine that I’m NOT keeping all these pictures. I could now delete every picture that didn’t have a heart!
STEP THREE: EDIT PHOTOS
I keep this simple and use the native iPhone editing tools. I usually boost the vibrancy a bit and, if needed, do a bit of cropping or straightening.
That’s it!
STEP FOUR: REMOVE PHOTOS
At the end of each month, I remove all the photos from my phone.
Because I’ve already culled and edited them, there’s no major decision-making left, just organizing.
We keep everything in a shared OneDrive folder.
STEP FIVE: ORGANIZE PHOTOS
I realized the easiest way to explain this was to write it out step by step.
First, I remove all photos from my phone and put them into a folder labelled something like “iPhone E.” John has a corresponding folder where he dumps his photos.
From there, everything follows this structure:
A. By year
This is always the top-level folder.
B. By quarter
Jan–Mar, Apr–Jun, Jul–Sept, Oct–Dec.
C. By category
Each quarter has about a dozen main categories—plus some hyper-specific ones. (For obvious reasons, there’s no Skiing folder in Jul–Sept.)
D. By sub-category
For big events—like trips (or visits from Cool Bloggers!!)—where we have hundreds of photos, I go one step further and subcategorize everything. So, for example, under “Birchie’s Visit” I would have subcategories of Cape Split, Medford Beach, and Peggy’s Cove.
Here’s another example (a rather bad one, because we actually went to Paris in March, but for the purposes of writing it out, I wanted to show more than one quarter, so just use your imagination). Let’s say I wanted to find a picture of myself in front of the Eiffel Tower. I would know exactly where to go.
2025 → Apr–Jun → Paris → Eiffel Tower
This makes it so much easier to a) find things and b) organize my photobooks since I’ve already done most of the “heavy lifting” in terms of editing/categorizing.
STEP SIX: MAKE PHOTOBOOKS
At the end of the (calendar) year, I start prepping our annual photobook. I use Blurb and wait for a discount code before ordering. When I started making photobooks, I opted for My Publisher. When they were acquired by Shutterfly (and everything moved online), I pivoted to Blurb because they have Bookwright, a desktop software that allows me to do everything offline and then simply upload my completed book at the end.
And that’s how I organize our photos. Any questions?
- Do you have a system for organizing photos—or is it chaos?
- Are you more of a “take 3 photos” person or a “take 37 just in case” person?
- Do you organize photos as you go, or save it all for one big cleanup?
- Do you use your phone, a camera, or a mix of both?
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My photos are chaos. As I have no blogs or photo books, I can go freestyle! I depend on Google photos to store my pix. I currently have 3500+ photos on my phone that I tried to go through and delete bad ones. I take way too many pictures. But I have cute cats and kids- I can’t help myself..
However, I can usually find a desiredphoto by date. Like yesterday my son asked if I had the picture of my big cat as show-and-tell for my youngest son. I knew it was 3rd grade , so three years ago, and just scanned through fall 2023 to find it. Inefficient but that’s how my brain works.
Your photos are organized so well!
Cute cats and kids = very good reasons to take lots of pictures.
This is a full masterclass in photo management. So organised!
I especially admire the daily delete habit. That’s something that I SHOULD do… why am I so hesitant to delete photos I clearly will not use??
I love the division of labour too. You on people, John on landscapes. That combo must make your photobooks so rich and balanced. Do Belle and Indy take any photos yet? That would add a whole other layer, haha!
My photos automatically upload to One Drive and are organised by month. If Kai has nice photos, I airdrop them to my phone so that his upload, too. This year, I have started to transfer good photos to a “Best of 2026” folder. I’m hoping to use that for a photo album at the end of the year. Let’s see how it goes!
Belle does take photos and it didn’t even cross my mind to get them from her. That said, they’re mostly selfies with friends and I’m not convinced she’d want them in the photobook? But I will DEFINITELY be getting her photos from when we’re in Europe. I love the different perspectives. Kids focus on completely different things.
Indy will have access to an old phone for taking some photos while we’re in Europe, and it’s a fun way to keep him engaged at places like a museum, so we’ll probably lean into that.
It’s brilliant to have a “Best of 2026” folder. I want to follow your lead. It would make things so much easier in terms of preparing photocards/calendars etc around Christmas time.
This is very helpful, thank you. Have you shared how you make your photo book prior? Much appreciated!
I’m pretty sure I have posted about making photobooks before… but it might have been on my old blog?
I’ve been using Blurb for about a decade now and it’s my go-to!
WOW. This is quite a system. Here’s my system: take lot of photos (but not as many as you!) and every few days go through and delete the ones I don’t want. I take a lot of photos for the blog that I don’t want permanently (like a picture of my dinner, or a book, and all the photos of me running or at the gym get deleted every week). I guess my ‘system” is working, since I don’t make photo books.
I also have to compliment you on your photography skills- now that I know you’re in charge of most of the “people” photos, I’m impressed that you do such a great job! John is not the only photographer in your family.
John is definitely the more creative photographer and knows how to “frame” pictures much more beautifully than I do, but I don’t get jealous… I just appreciate not having that pressure on me! And I like to take photos of people because it’s what makes the photobooks “sing” in my opinion. Especially since the kids change so much year over year.
Your system sounds like it works great!!
I’ve said this before but it’s worth saying again. I was SHOCKED when I learned that all of your photos are phone photos. I was sure that you were hauling a big ol’ SLR everywhere with you. My shocker for this post was that you do all of your editing on the phone as well.
I am definitely team “take 37 pictures just in case”, and I’m good about culling them down to just the best shots. I don’t cull every day, but I do it regularly. The only bad photo is the one that you didn’t take!
I backup all my pix to Dropbox, which is what I’ve used for years, but I’m open to trying something else. The storage space with the free account fills up pretty quickly, so I have to back it up more frequently than I would like. I import all of my blog photos from Google photos. The pix are mostly “as is” but if I need to crop or give a photo a little pop I use the Google photos tools. If a picture needs more of an assist than Google can give me, then I take it to Photoshop. The camera raw editor has a magic “make this look good” button. If there is something that I want to take out of a photo, I use the “fill – content aware” option, which does a good job of removing things and replacing them based on what’s in the rest of the photo. For example, a tour guide took my picture when I was in New Orleans, and it was a great shot but my purse and coat were on the ground at my feet. All that I had to do was to made a crude circle and tell photoshop to make that part of the picture look like the rest of the ground.
“The only bad photo is the one that you didn’t take!” Amen, sister! Preach!!
One thing lacking in my current iPhone is the ability to remove things (like your purse example). My niece who was visiting last month has a newer iPhone and she can just swipe over something (say a tree branch in the way) and it will magically disappear. I suppose I could use Photoshop but I have zero interest in taking things to that level. In-app editing capabilities are enough for me and even then, I would say I average a few seconds on each photo I edit. For the most part, what you see is what you get!
We only use our phones now. My husband takes 15 pictures for every 1 that I take and I ask him to send me any good ones. I just went through my annual photo purge. I have my iphone connected to my ipad so I can see the photos enlarged. I delete some, but mostly I move all the photos I want to print into an ipad album, then upload them to the photo website. It’s there that I edit, purge again, and finalize the ones I want printed. For all of 2025, I printed about 125 pictures. Then they go into a photo album for our family room, but I frequently take pictures out to use in 4X6 frames I have scattered around the house and change them out for the seasons.
I did my first photo book last year of our family vacation of 2024. It took me FOREVER, so I give you credit for trying to do one for an entire year!
That’s awesome that you have a great system and follow through! Printing off the photos can be a big hurdle for people so all the gold stars for actually completing that final step.
Photo books are definitely a labour of love…
Love this! I used to have my instagram set up to Chatbooks, so it would print a photobook every 60 pictures. Now th two apps cannot talk to each other anymore, so I have to manually put my IG feed into the CB app, but I do it, still, and I get a cute photobook every couple of months.
Awww. That’s so fun. I had no idea you had this system in place!
Well done, Elisabeth!
Um, your system is AMAZING. Can you please come and organize all my photos since 2013 please? They are A MESS. I have no organization system whatsoever. My husband’s system is a lot better, but his is still not as specific as yours. (At least he can find something pretty quickly though. I… cannot.)
This is exactly the same for us, except I spell labor differently and my husband’s name is different! “We have a pretty natural “division of labour” when it comes to pictures. John tends to photograph things; I tend to photograph people. There’s overlap, of course, but generally speaking: if it’s a person, I took it. If it’s a beautiful landscape or an architectural wonder, John did. (That said, he is far better at capturing selfies of the two of us than I am.)”
I would LOVE to come organize your photos. No. Really. I would!
ELISABETH. Do not tempt me. (Just for curiosity’s sake, what might a person of your skill set charge for such a service?)
For you, obviously free of charge <3
Elisabeth, I have 3820 photos in my phone’s photo gallery. I need you to come and organize all of them. #sendhelp #helpless
I’ll be right there…!
I am the John here. I rarely take photos of people, unless we are at a family gathering or something, and then even then they are mostly candid. I am horrible at organizing people together to make sure that there are good group shots etc. Thank goodness I have a few dedicated selfie takers in my friends group, or I probably would not have any photos of myself! For organizing, I try to favorite everything at least once a month, then at the end of the year, I look at all my favorites (only) and choose several from each month, and put them into a XXXX (year) Favorites folder, which I then use to create my holiday card or other things. I do not do a photo book. For my GoPro videos, I take them off the camera and put them on my computer in folders with the date YYYY.MM.DD and location so that I can find them later. For my regular photos, if I need something from a certain time, I find it either by date if I know that, by location or I search me+paris for example, and all of the photos of myself in Paris would come up, and I would use the favorite (probably) one that I had already chosen.
You have a great system!
I don’t necessarily LIKE taking pictures of people, but I know they’re my favourite to look back on!
I’m jealous of your system. I fall into the chaos department. Most of the photos on my phone and google photos are from the tots I sit for. I share pics and videos of our days on a FB group of just the parents. But – I’m terrible about deleting the photos. I recently started moving photos from google photos to snapfish – which is like a shutterfly site. I have all my ‘real camera’ digital photos stored there, so I can keep them all in one place. I’ve been deleting them off of google photo once they are in Snapfish, but it is time consuming and I’m so far behind. I don’t do photo books. I am a photo album person, but I feel like I should convert to photo books, because I could order multiple and they’re slim and easier to store. I want to cry because I have dozens and dozens of photo albums put together and it feels inconsistent or something to switch gears now. Perhaps this is a job for a retired me – down the road. Getting them organized in one spot is half the battle.
That’s so sweet that parents are able to get a glimpse into their day <3
There is no one right answer and I agree that to tackle a backlog is DEFINITELY a job for retirement. But, also, there isn't anything that says you have to go back...you could just start whenever the urge strikes and only do pictures moving forward.
OMG – I love this in the weeds kind of post. I think this is the perfect example about how consistent small steps can keep something from being overwhelming.
I do want to get my photos off my phone and make a photo book some day, andI do want my Husbands pictures too – he takes the kid on so many adventures without me that a huge part of our life would be missing if I just did our pictures. I think I feel overwhelmed because the last time I made a photobook was when our 14 year old was one. So there are a lot of years to go through, and I don’t know if I should do year by year, or one book of several years, just to have something done. Or maybe start with 2025? I’m sure it’s one of those “start somewhere” kind of things wher it doesn’t matter where I start, I just need to start. I have an iPhone and my Husband has an Android, so we need to find a system that works for both of us if I’m going to get his photos. Plus he takes so many random photos of reciepts and parking space – do I really want to wade through all that?
Yes! Picture management could be incredibly overwhelming, so having a concrete system really helps me stay on top of it.
I would just start with the current. Maybe later in life you could do earlier years? I think it’s too overwhelming to try to clear the backlog.
Oh this is so fun. I use Slidebox and go through every few weeks to delete photos, capture any info from screenshots, and put the best in a folder. And the plan is to print the photos and stick them in an album. If A takes a great photo, he’ll normally post it on the family group chat, so I’ll download it from there. I’ve made a good start with the album – T aged 0-8, my ambition to do this yearly has clearly failed. I think my ex-yearbook editor perfectionism is too strong to let me do them online and I don’t really want more time at the computer.
Perfectionism is HARD to quash. I’ve slowly gotten less and less picky about my books. I think I’ve realized my family just appreciates the books and doesn’t really care if I accidentally use the same picture twice or get a caption wrong.
I used to save photos on my computer + backed them up on a hard drive but I stopped doing that since using Google. I do pay for extra storage through Google. I try to go through photos a month at a time. So ideally in February I would cull the photos I took in January and would create a “favorites” folder that I label “January 20XX.” I do that so I can use those monthly albums to make our photo calendar each year which I gift to my MIL + order for our kitchen. I used to use those favorites folders to make photo books but I didn’t make a 2024 photobook and don’t know that I care to go back and do it, so I might just be done making photo books? They honestly don’t get looked at. I do worry I’m being a little bit short sighted by not continuing to make them, but the kids love to look through the photos on their iPads (both boys are on my apple ID so they can see all of the pictures I’ve taken).
Your system is very organized! Photo storage can be an unwieldy task!
Photobooks are not a one-size-fits-all. They’ve been a great thing for our family and we take SO MANY PICTURES, but with the easy access to photos on devices, I can see it being a superfluous step for many people. It’s great the boys are looking at photos and it’s cheaper and easier to skip the photobook step 😉
Fascinating!
Similarly to you, I remove photos from my phone every month up to every quarter. Then transfer them to my laptop and a harddrive backup (nothing on the cloud). I have folders named Year_Quarter_Paris for day to day pictures and Year_Month_Place-that-I-visited for trips. When doing this archiving, I remove duplicates/bad pictures but otherwise do no do much.
Later, much later, at the end of the year, I go through each folder (usually about a dozen) for that year and pick around 350 to 400 favorites for my yearly photobook 🙂
It’s so very satisfying to have a faithful system that works!!
I am the main photographer in my family, although at the end of trips, I will go through G’s and get him to drop them off to me. All my photos just go in the photos app on my computer plus each month upload them to an online site which is our backup. The kids have the login for that so they could, if they wanted to, access all our family photos themselves. I love photobooks, but am way behind on doing them. I usually like to do seperate trip books for major trips.
I love that your kids have access to the family photos! It brings so much joy to look back at evidence of all the fun times had together.
This is a great way to organize your photos, Elisabeth. I thought I had a pretty good system down, but now feel like I can improve on it. Thank you for the suggestions!
I also take a lot of photos and usually go through and delete photos I don’t want to keep every few days. I also favorite or add captions to some photos, so it’s easier to search for them later. I usually transfer my photos regularly (though not monthly) to my computer and have them organized by year and month. I could improve on more specific categories. My biggest “issue” is that it’s harder to search for photos once they’re on the computer and I often have to remember year and month when events happened. Do you always delete everything off your phone? I tend to keep certain pictures in my favorites folder so I can have access to them.
Do you have a secondary backup?
I admit I don’t regularly search for photos and I tend to know what year certain things happened so I can navigate to the folders quickly, but this is definitely a weak link in my process. Someone else wouldn’t necessarily be able to find things quickly.
I delete everything off my phone at the end of the month (I have an older iPhone so storage isn’t great). I move them into OneDrive. Every year or so John will do an external hard drive backup of that, but I do mostly have my proverbial eggs in one basket.