Treat Your Photo Library Like the Resume of Your Life

YOU MATTER. YOUR PICTURES PROVE IT

Photo by Sara on Unsplash

When I help people organize their photos there’s often this underlying desire to satisfy someone else. Will the kids care about this? God, my photo library is such a MESS! I’ve got over twenty thousand pictures . . . Thousand!

If your photo collection was a resume, you’d have a master’s degree in travel/parenthood/dining/friendship/dancing/pets/laughing/community/activism/gardening/sports/boating/hiking/sunsets/people/art/comfort/support and maybe a disaster or two along the way. Every picture was a life moment remarkable enough to record.

That’s not nothing.

Own it. Cherish it.

There are no picture police.

But what you do get to do is polish it.

Like any good resume.

There’s never been anything quite like the Photos Library since - well - our brain. It just collects captured moments as we go and tosses them all into this big hopper. To be recalled as desired. It’s a bit like live-streaming a parade. There are some floats and marching bands, and then bare pavement while the next one catches up.

The edited version is always much better.

And “better” is within your grasp. The tools to do that get more useful all the time. If you are struggling with guilt over a cluttered photo library and get frustrated with browsing through your Library view to find “that” shot, just be thankful that the stars are aligning now for nicer, cleaner, more efficient ways of sprucing up your collection.

A lot of that is already in place. Apple created Collections to parse your Library into more manageable pieces. Machine Learning and object recognition have become amazingly good. Meaningful photo aware AI is evolving daily. There’s a lot of opportunity here for efficiencies that didn’t even exist a year ago.

Let’s look at your photos through that resume lens and put together a collection that captures the high points and those special moments you gathered along the way.

Like a job resume, there are experiences you want to include and ones you don’t. Incidental moments that were significant at the time, but have lost their luster through the years. The resume you crafted for a summer job in college is not the same as the one for that management opportunity in your 30’s. There are the certificates, awards, recognitions, and references. Projects, memberships, and activities. And people. The ones who you met on your journey for a bit or forever.

Your photo library is a living document in the same way, and offers an emotional framework that 24 pound 8.5 x 11 bright white inkjet paper does not. But it’s also more comprehensive than a job resume; more of a curriculum vitae - “course of life” - from which your résumés are drawn. The raw material, so to speak. A personal lifetime documentary.

Think about that.

Historically, we had a family photo collection. Driven by the fact that there was typically one camera/camcorder and one family member to took responsibility for recording the family journey. Media was added at random, usually in sync with milestone events and activities. And the narrative was mostly from one perspective.

With Gen Z, that narrative becomes personal. A generation of media experts where images are the atomic particle of conversation and connection. How will that reframe the family photo collection? When a family of four has four different viewpoints of the family journey to contribute?

So we’re talking about YOUR journey as the foundation. Your experiences. Your relationships. Your activities. Start to think about your photos as a contribution to the family narrative if that helps, but not as THE family narrative.

So let’s do that, with these things in mind.

1. There are essentially just 2 tasks in photo organizing: decluttering and curating. Pictures are either distracting or nurturing.

2. There is no magic number. Whatever number of images you have, it’s probably more than you had last week and less than you’ll have next year. Photography is an eternal work in progress. There’s no finish line to cross.

3. A picture doesn’t necessarily need a home. Most photos will fall between the curated and clutter windows, and that’s fine. We no longer need to identify every image because Photos does most of that for us in one way or another.

4. This is your own CV. Whatever contributes to your story is fair game. Doesn’t matter if there are a zillion pictures of the Grand Canyon in the world already. If you were there and you were moved to take the shot, you get to include it to remind you of your own experience. And, by the way, if you are worried about leaving a legacy collection that your family won’t appreciate, think of it as leaving a memoir. Because, it is.

The easiest way to start is to declutter.

Go to the Utilities Collection. Here you’ll find 5 great tools.

Duplicates - Photos now analyzes your photos while you’re sleeping and identifies the duplicates that crept into your Library. It identifies the best quality image, merges the unique data and any Album assignments into it and deletes the extra(s).

Receipts - Anything that looks like a receipt. Unless it’s a reminder of that 1935 Auburn Boattail Speedster you owned, receipts should be moved to your Notes App or saved to a Folder and deleted from Photos.

Handwriting - This is where whiteboard snapshots, handmade wall menus, and clever protest signs live. Again, most are either old news or belong in Notes/Folders somewhere.

Illustrations - If you or your child is a budding artist, these might be legit, but it’s also the realm of old presentations and pie charts, graffiti, and winning plays in Word Chums. Your call.

Documents - Pay attention here. Photos will treat anyone reading a newspaper (remember those) as a document plus all the business cards, driver’s licenses, cancelled checks and wall charts. As with other Utilities Collections, a lot of these photo are truly clutter and should be saved elsewhere on your device. iCloud Folders work nicely for legal and financial documents. Licenses, Registrations, and sensitive data can be saved to Notes and protected with a password.

QR codes - It’s a sign of the times that QR codes have their own Collection. But most of the ones we take become irrelevant or out of date. To check it you need to long press (on phone) or scan it from your Mac and paste into Safari. FYI - my iPhone created a QR Collection of about 20 codes, but on my Mac they appeared in the Documents Collection. Go Figure.

The nice thing about photos that land in Utilities is that they don’t show up in Memory Movies or Featured Photos.

Documents | Photos by the Author

After Utilities the next destination is Media Types. Your mileage may vary but I find that Selfies, Portrait, and Panoramas are the low-hanging fruit here. These are the types of photos that most everyone does, and shoots multiples of “just in case.” If you are a video person, include those too.

It’s time to take a stand and pick one.

Then there are the outliers. Animated, Time-lapse, Slo-mo, and Burst. They are more rare, but they also don’t usually work as intended and just ought to go away if they don’t.

Live Photos are a special case. If you are a Live Photo fan then you probably have a ton of these that didn’t work out. Otherwise you took them by accident. But you’ll need to look at the motion and see if it works for you. If so, that’s great. If not, turn it off or delete it.

Last of the clutter busters are Screenshots and Screen Recordings.

I’ve seen Photos Libraries that are nothing but Screen Shots and Recordings, at which point a separate Photos Library is really the ticket. Screenshots are really just visual reminders, so they belong in a Notes file or something like Evernote. Cluttering up your personal memoir with products and offers doesn’t celebrate your journey in any way.

And if you need those reminders, make it a habit to review your screenshots every week and either commit them to a different spot or delete them altogether. You’ll feel better for it.

More importantly, you’ll have gotten down to the good stuff. Those photos and videos that really tell your story. The travel / parenthood / dining / friendship / dancing / pets / laughing / community / activism / sports / boating / hiking /sunsets /people /art / comfort / support that make you, you.

And you can begin to create a Photo Library resume that truly nurtures your soul.