As we continue the journey of organizing and archiving all your photos, I want to focus this post on your phone photos. I have an iPhone so this post will focus on the icons and process used in the iOS operating system.

Before we set up the filing system on your computer, let's tackle one of the biggest sources of your photos - your phone! How many of you have thousands of photos on your phone (I'm raising my hand here!) and don't even know where to begin trying to sort through everything? Let's set up a system to get the most important photos on your phone separated from the thousands.

The first thing I do, is select my Favorite images. To select your favorite images, go in to your Camera Roll/Recents and simply click the heart at the bottom of an image and the phone places the photo in to its own folder called "Favorites". Do you really need 10 images of the same flower? Not really. So, pick the one or two that you like the most and add them as a Favorite.

Now, you've narrowed 6,000 photos down to maybe 2,000. Still a lot of images, but more manageable!

At this point, you only want to look at your Favorites folder. 

To make it more organized before saving to your computer, I recommend creating separate folders for specific categories. Let's say you have a LOT of photos of your dog, spring flowers, a special birthday party, or a vacation. To create the folders to break down your Favorites, you simply go in to the Favorites folder, click "Select" at the top of your screen, and then begin clicking on all the images that would fit into a category.

Start with one category - I've selected Aine, our giant lap dog. After you've selected all your images for a category, click the box with an arrow at the bottom left corner of the screen.

On the next window you'll scroll up and select "Add to Album".

The next window will show you an empty "new album". Select the new album, give it a name, and all the images you selected will go in to that folder.

This project is easy to do while hanging out on the porch, filling a rainy day, or while waiting for your kids.

Once you get started, make this a weekly or monthly habit!

In the next post we'll set up your computer filing system.