Photos: Delete and Edit on the Day You Take the Pic

We all love taking photos. It’s so easy now on our phones to not only take pictures, but to take dozens at a time. Face it, they aren’t all precious and they aren’t all perfect. To keep control: edit the photo the day you take it. Be religious about deleting the less than great ones and take the time to edit those you want to keep. You can do it in less than thirty minutes in front of the TV or riding (as a passenger) in a car.

It’s also good to have a filing system that makes your pictures easy to find. Of course, you need to send your edited pics to that file the day you take them. I can’t tell you how easy it is now to look for pictures that I want when I can open my computer and see a list like this: “Cora first year” or “Alex age 1–2.”

My photo inventory list now has about thirty designations . . . and I don’t drive myself crazy with the dates they were taken. Who cares? My big list looks like this: “Craig age 1–5,” “Craig age 5–10,” “Craig preteen to high school,” “Friends 1980–90,” “Friends 1990–2000,” “Wedding Lindsey and Craig,” and more.

Another tip: Have hundreds—thousands—of old pictures? First, toss out half of them. Then hire a neighborhood kid one summer and have him scan all your old pics once you have sorted through and selected only the best. It is a crazy job but so worth it. Once you scan all your photos, you will still have books or boxes of pictures. Make sure you put a red dot or some mark on the back of all photos that were scanned, or you will wonder at a later date if you scanned them.

What to do with the old copies? I gave my kids a bunch of them. Then I took handfuls and put them in a big bowl on our coffee table; when friends and family come over, you should see the smiles as they sort through them. When one gets dog-eared and awful looking, it gets tossed because all these treasures are on my computer and in the Cloud. Once you know where they are, when you want to make a video, create a picture book for grandkids, or use them in any other way, they are all so easy to retrieve.