How I finally tamed my photo collection
Plus: tell me your digital clutter challenges.
A quick question before we get into today’s post about photo clutter:
Is your digital clutter a source of stress? I’ve been working with a client weekly over the past month to sort through her digital clutter (photos, Dropbox and Drive folders, task management system, calendar, etc) and I’m realizing that digital clutter can benefit from systems just like physical clutter. I’d love to hear what problems people are facing in this area, and what might be well for them. Please share in the comments!
I’ve mentioned this project before, but I’ve been working over the past year to slim down my iPhoto collection on my phone (and in that enigmatic cloud) to something I can wrap my mind around.
I kept imagining myself in old age, kids out of the house, fondly looking back over the photos of my lifetime, only to find hundreds of package tracking screenshots, whiteboards from work brainstorms, and 12 versions of each baby photo of my kids, ever so slightly different. I would not enjoy that! It might even keep me from walking down memory lane to begin with.
So I set out to prune my collection down to only great (ok, decent) photos that I imagined one day delighting in seeing. My criteria was What would future-me enjoy seeing?
There are a few ways to tackle this undertaking:
Spend 5 days in hell going through the entire photo roll.
Discipline yourself to search for today’s date in your phone, every single day, for a year, and delete extraneous photos.
Find a streamlined way to do the second option above. Read on for the miracle app I found…