Organizing and sorting your photo albums
You have 30,000 photos on your phone and nobody ever looks at them. The problem is not the volume — it is the absence of albums. Here is a sorting method that survives real life.
Sort by event, never by raw date
A folder called "2019" means nothing to a child opening it thirty years from now. An album called "Summer at Grandma’s, Percé, 2019" already tells a story.
Make one album per meaningful event: a trip, a milestone birthday, a birth, a move, an entire summer if it mattered. Ten to fifteen albums a year is plenty.
The 20-photo rule
A 400-photo album will never be viewed to the end. A 20-photo album gets opened again, shown to people, sent around.
After each event, pick the best while you still remember what mattered. The rest stay in your raw backup: you lose nothing, you simply make the essential visible.
- One photo per moment, not six versions of the same shot.
- Keep the imperfect ones where everyone is laughing — those are the keepers.
- Add one context shot: the house, the table, the street.
Name and caption for the next generation
The most durable system is a simple, consistent naming convention: year, month, place, event. "2019-07 Percé — summer at Grandma’s" can be found, sorted and understood with whatever tool exists in twenty years.
Add one caption per album, not per photo. It is realistic, and it is already far more than most families leave behind.
One shared place instead of ten phones
As long as albums live on a single phone, they depend on one password, one subscription and one device. Family cannot reach them, and nobody will know how to recover them.
A shared space, where everyone adds and finds albums, changes everything: photos become a common thing again rather than a private pile nobody sorts.
Frequently asked questions
Should I delete duplicates?
Delete burst shots and screenshots freely; never delete old photographs. The storage saved is not worth the risk on anything irreplaceable.
Where do I start when everything is a mess?
Do not start at the beginning of time. Start with the current year, build the habit, then process one past year each month. The backlog clears itself in about two years.
How much time does this take?
Twenty minutes after each event is enough. It is the giant catch-up that defeats people, never the routine upkeep.
Solexi does not replace a legal will, a notary or a lawyer. Solexi helps you gather, organize and pass on your information.