Got lots of vacation photos? Here's my process for getting organized.

Great trip but too many photos!

If you are like me, you take way too many trip photos! It’s so easy in the digital age to take tons of photos. Think of your last trip (or day trip to someplace fun). How many photos did you come home with? Lots I bet!

My husband and I love to travel, and I love to take photos just about all of the time. As you can imagine, I have a lot of photos on my phone and from my camera memory cards. A lot. 9000+ on my phone. And over 200,000 on my computer. That does sound a bit crazy, doesn’t it? But with all of that travel and all of those photos to sort through, I’ve come up with a method that speeds things up and helps me enjoy them and not feel overwhelmed.

Cell phone photos &/or camera photos?

Do you use your cell phone only or your camera or both to photograph trips? I use both! I use my phone for spontaneous photos to share right away, for short videos, or for shots I want to take when I don’t have my camera with me.  I use my camera when I plan ahead. This means I have photos in two places to manage. While I love the quality of photos taken on cell phones like my iPhone 11 Pro Max, I do feel the quality of photos taken with a DSLR or a mirrorless camera still exceeds cell phones. Cameras also offer the ability to control the lenses and settings to make photography more creative. That said, cell phone photography is just fine if that’s what you do!

What process do you follow when you have loads of photos to review? Here is my process. Let's see if I can help make the job of organizing your photos easier for you!

An example: Yellowstone National Park

As an example of a trip and how I manage my photos, I’ll use our trip to Yellowstone National Park in May 2022. What a fantastic trip! I went with all of my camera gear and was ready to see all there was to see!

I came home with 1600+ photos – cell phone and camera combined. That is a lot of images to sort through and it can feel overwhelming to figure out how to do something meaningful with them.

These 2 photos show the unique landscape of Yellowstone. It is like being on another planet.

Start with goals

Here’s what I do. I have learned to take my time knowing that it can take a few sessions to get this done.

First, it’s important to identify what you want to do with your photos. There are lots of possibilities. What do you want to do?

• Leave the best ones on your phone for viewing and sharing
• Edit some on your phone for fun and to make them extra special
• Print some yourself or using an online service to frame them for your walls, as gifts, or for a scrapbook
• Send some to an e-frame - We love doing this!
• Use an online service to create a photo book of your trip
  • Tip: Google “custom photo books” – there are lots of places – look for sales!
• Create an online gallery to share with family and friends
• Load your best onto your website or print on demand store for sale

Next up, sorting!

Sorting on my phone:

1. I select all of the photos from the trip and put them in an album (i.e. “Yellowstone2022”).
2. I browse through the album with the purpose of just deleting obvious duds. Keepers and maybes stay.
3. I make a second pass through and delete some of the maybes. If you plan to edit photos from your trip, keep the best of the maybes. Once edited, they may become keepers.
4. Verify that the photos have been backed up. Mine go to my google photos (cloud storage).

Sorting on my computer (skip this part if you just use your phone):

1. I take my memory cards from my camera and load them onto my computer, using Adobe Lightroom (LR).
   1. Tip: Don’t reformat/reuse the memory cards at least for a while as an additional backup.
2. For big trips, I create a new LR catalog such as “Yellowstone2022”.
3. LR allows me to import my photos from the memory cards into the new catalog and onto a computer hard drive at the same time.
   1. Tip: Name directories on your hard drive with meaningful names, not just dates. You may forget when you travelled but not where you went! I used “Yellowstone2022” for this trip.
4. Just like on my phone, I then take a pass through all the photos in the LR catalog to ‘reject’ the duds. When done, I can delete the ‘rejected’ photos from the catalog and from disk all at once – super easy.
5. I take one more pass through in case I see more duds. I also rank photos as I go. I mark photos with an * if I think they are winners. For me winners are photos with great bones that I think I can do something with – such as frame or sell. I also identify with a color tag any photos that I think might be good for a family photo book (i.e. all ‘red’ tagged photos may become a book).
   1. LR allows for many ways to categorize photos – super powerful and useful!
6. I transfer the photo album photos from my phone to my computer and load them into LR with a keyword of ‘fromphone’. I quickly go through them to * the best ones and mark the photo book photos.
7. The result is I can now filter my photos for only the best, for those to consider for a photo book, and I can see them all – maybes included – if I want to.
8. Just like for my phone, I make sure my photos are being backed up on my computer. I use the Backblaze cloud backup system

The result is a phone album and a LR catalog of my photos from the trip – both cleaned up to only include my favorite photos, and some maybes to reconsider in the future. I’ve identified photos to create a family photo book or to sell, and I’ve verified that they are all backed up (always make sure they are backed up!).

To edit or not to edit

Since I do sell my photos, I edit the keepers and consider downloading them for sale on my website. I also edit some from my ‘family photo book’ category. I edit on my computer – the bigger screen is a lot easier for my eyes. If you don’t use a computer, you can edit on your phone using any app. I recommend Adobe Lightroom (I use Classic). 

Why edit? Editing may make the photos brighter, more colorful, cropped to a better size, etc. Editing is optional. It can be very fun, creative and I love doing it. Sometimes, I go back years later and do more editing and create more artwork from my trip photos. That’s another good reason to keep the maybes.. Someday you may go back and make them keepers.

Here is an example of a before/after edit photo of a Bison mom and her 'red dog' as the babies are called! The 2nd photo is richer and the Bison are more visible and full of texture - all with some editing!

Which parts of this process resonate with you?

Managing trip photos can be a challenge. It is so fun to TAKE the photos. That is actually my favorite part, but coming home with so many to sort through can be hard. I hope this blog post helps you streamline that process. With a repeatable process in place, it really can go quickly. Start with the end goal in mind – what you want to do with your photos – and go from there. Let me know how it goes!