Due to the availability and ease of smartphone cameras, most people are now able to document their lives and families.
Photographic memories are no longer reserved for special events and formal portraits. We are now able to capture the sentimental details of our day-to-day lives.
It’s easier! There is less work involved with digital photography, and the costs of capturing and printing have been diminished.
Sharing milestones and memories with family and friends is easier than ever before.
We live in a time where everything is documented and highly photographed. Today’s kids are growing up with a phone capturing more details of their lives than generations before.
The question is…where are these memories? Will your kids be able to access them decades later from the cloud? Where are the prints and photo albums?
The days of excitedly packing up your film to be mailed and awaiting your memories are long gone. Today’s memories are available immediately, often leading us to collect way too many, and quickly becoming overwhelmed with what to do with them.
Culling images is the process of selecting your favorites and deleting the rest. This creates a streamlined process, allows you to print and save what you really love, while also reducing your print costs and increasing storage space.
Decide how often feels right for you…Daily? Weekly?
Use idle time (waiting for an appointment, in the carpool pick up line, traveling, etc.) to go through your phone and delete. Be aggressive with your culling. You don’t need 10 photos of the same scene with slightly different expressions or details. Pick your favorite and move on.
If you are working with images on a computer, integrate culling into your upload process. This will ensure that you are not loading more images onto your computer than you need.
In order to not feel overwhelmed, culling has to become a habit.
There are many options for sorting your images. What you choose will depend on how many images you are taking and what you plan to do with them.
You can sort images by month, season, special occasion and/or year.
Pick your method and put it on your calendar. Just like any habit, it will take some time to become part of your routine. We do this in many areas of our lives: work, cleaning, exercise, bill paying, bookkeeping, etc.
Taking the time to sort smaller batches of images, will make any printing plans easier to accomplish and stick with. This process coincides nicely with a regular habit of backing up your images(more to come).
We recommend printing monthly for several reasons…
Printing from your phone options:
Printing from your computer options:
We suggest making saving and backing up your images a part of your monthly printing routine. This way it is just part of your habit and your photos are already organized so this step is very streamlined.