Every January 1, cull last year's photos
One session a year, on a predictable date: keep the winners, delete the twelve near-identical shots of the same sunset.
eric has done this
You have 40,000 photos and cannot find the one of your daughter on the dock. Not because it isn't there, but because it's sitting between eleven other frames of the same three seconds, and so is everything else.
Photo organization fails as a project because it has no end. It works as an annual ritual with a fixed scope: last year only.
What you need
- Whatever photo app you already use — Apple Photos, Google Photos. Both let you filter by date range.
- A recurring calendar event on January 1 — the date is doing real work here. It's the one day the previous year is a closed set.
- 90 minutes and something to watch.
Do this
- Filter to January 1 – December 31 of the year that just ended. Nothing older. The scope is what makes this finishable.
- Go month by month. In each burst of near-identical shots, keep one. Delete the rest without deliberating — you will never miss frame 7 of 11.
- Delete outright: screenshots, receipts, photos of parking spots, blurry frames, pictures of documents you already filed.
- Favorite (heart) the genuinely good ones as you pass them. That's the actual output — a short, findable set for the year.
- Make an album named for the year and drop the favorites in it.
- Empty the Recently Deleted folder. Otherwise you freed nothing.
What changes
A year that's maybe a third the size and 100% findable, plus a 40-photo favorites album that's the raw material for a calendar, a Christmas card, or a slideshow at a birthday.
Do this three years running and the backlog stops growing. Do it for the years before that only if you feel like it — the ritual matters more than the archive.
