Organising and Storing Phone Photos
- ginnykoppenhol
- Mar 22
- 2 min read
In my smartphone photography workshops, I often get asked about how to organise and store the 1000s of images we often accumulate.
I created this handout, and thought it would be handy to share on here too. This is definitely not a definitive guide, but more a starting point.
I'd love to hear your methods and thoughts too.
Find a system that works for you, but my main pieces of advice are to:
a) Schedule regular time (even if it’s annually in the new year) to organise your photos
b) Never have photos in one place only
Storage options:
- On your phone
- Cloud storage
- External hard drives
- On your PC
- Printing
There are pros and cons to each so use multiple methods.
Here’s an article that goes into the different options:
What I do…
1. Get into good habits – deleting and storing photos
DELETE PHOTOS YOU DON’T NEED: Regularly delete photos you don’t want to keep. It’ll make the ‘big saves’ much easier. I tend to do this every time I have taken lots of photos eg. on a day out or after a holiday.
SYNC (AKA BACK UP): I have an iPhone, so I sync to iCloud (ongoing back up)
2. Longer-term storage (2 types)
Annually in the new year, I copy my photos from iCloud (I log in via my desktop so I can see everything more easily), sort them on my PC (including sorting photos / videos into separate folders). and move to my OneDrive cloud storage and external hard drives into a folder I’ve created for that year.
3. Deleting from your phone / iCloud
Once I have the photos backed up in multiple places, I delete from iCloud, which also deletes from my phone which creates space. But be mindful of any photo albums you have saved on your phone, as deleting the photos will also mean that they disappear from the albums.
4. Printing
I create a photo book (via Photobox but there are many options) each year too – mainly family photos.
Some extra tips for organising photos on your desktop using Microsoft Windows (Mac instructions to follow) :
· When organising photos, you can click ‘View’ at the top of the page, to see either a “List” of filenames or “Icons” (thumbnails of the photos) in different sizes. This can make organising and naming photos a lot easier.
· You can also ‘batch rename’ files by:
> highlighting the images you want to rename
> then right-clicking on the first image in the list
> clicking ‘rename’ (a small ‘A’ symbol at the top of the menu),
> then adding the new name. It will add numbers in brackets after each one.
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