LONDON (AP) – Summer vacation is over, and all the great times you’ve had during your vacation are commemorated with hundreds of smartphone photos. What now?
Some highlights – the most beautiful sunsets, the best group shots – have been posted on Instagram or shared by family chat groups. But more people will suffer in the camera roll.
Smartphones have a huge increase in file storage, so taking photos is too easy just because you can. But it’s too easy to forget about them, as it’s also a real job to look into them all later.
Below is a quick and easy way to help you deal with photos (and videos) that overwhelm your phone.
Please choose your favorite
Most Important Shots – There are some outstanding photos you want to share with others, or some of the shots you know to look back in a few years or just keep for reference. Stars or Hearts Photos that fall within this category can be placed in a folder or album for your favorites.
Delete in Help
After a recent family trip to Türkiye, I’ve had quite a lot of pictures of the restaurant and cafe menus. They were shared in the family WhatsApp group and decided where and what to eat. But we probably won’t visit those facilities again.
It is always a good habit to ull up photos you don’t need anymore. This can include screenshots, photos of receipts, or replicas. But examining hundreds of travel photos can be a bit boring without help. Fortunately, dozens of photo deletion and cleanup apps are available that are intended to speed up your work.
Many of them are similar to dating apps like Tinder. Because you can swipe left to delete and swipe right to save the photo. Some are free, while others require a subscription.
If there are similar but not identical images, they will start to become more challenging. Which one should I keep? Some apps have comparison features to help you make your decision.
I’ve tried some of these apps and found that similar features of the clever cleaner work well, and it helps to cut down many of the various near-identical shots I took on the Istanbul skyline, for example, across the Boss Horace Strait on a ferry at dusk. The free app grouped similar photos together and suggested the best shots to hold. I found out I generally agreed to the suggestion.
Tips for organizing your photos
Even if you could sort the camera roll, it would probably be a clutter of images that stretch into an unbroken stream.
Therefore, group photos into albums organized by theme. Android and iPhone users can do this with the Photo app for their respective operating systems. Select all photos from your trip and add them to your new album.
Planning ahead will make this process easier. Create an album when you start your trip, then save the photos when you take a photo.
You can also create shared albums on Android or iPhone. This allows others to view or comment on photos, or add their own comments.
If you don’t want to set up a shared album, Android and Google Photos let others see the album and individual photos so that users can create links. It’s not that easy on iOS. This only allows users to export photos from the album. You can share individual photos with iCloud links, but they will expire in 30 days.
Don’t forget to print
Now that we’ve edited and curated our holiday photos, consider using an analog approach to show off.
Print them and put them in albums where people can turn them over instead of scrolling. Or blow up the most eye-catching shots and frame them and hang them as wall art.
Google Photos offers photobook printing services that use artificial intelligence to use photos on popular themes that curate photos, such as spring 2025, memory, or generating very fast growth and basic ruffle layouts.
Other services such as Mixbook and ShutterFly offer services that automatically generate more sophisticatedly designed photobooks. Mixbooks can also provide AI-generated photo captions, but the results can be mixed completely.
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San Francisco AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.
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Fix: The AP misidentifies the company that provides photobooks. It’s not shutterstock, it’s shutterfly.
