How To Organise Your Camera Roll As You Take Photos

Any busy mum knows how easy it is for your life to get messy and disorganised. The same goes for your phone and camera roll. We take a million and one pictures, especially if you’re a blogger or social media influencer (as we sometimes like to call ourselves). We can take at least 100 pictures of the same shot, pictures of our adorable kids or even the flat lay we took hours to create. This is why you need to spend a little time each month going through your phone to organise your camera roll.

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Tip 1 – Plan ahead to organise your camera roll

Pick a day each week to sit down and go through all of your photos. Sundays, for me, work best as it is my “reset day” when I look back over the week and look at my week ahead with my planner and schedules and put together all of my to-do’s, meal plans, inventory checks and so forth. Block out some time to dedicate to go through all of your pictures to organise your camera roll.

Of course, if this is your first time attempting to clean up and organise your camera roll, then I can imagine what sort of mess it may be in. This type of decluttering and organising project will take a little longer than your maintenance time as this will be the first time you are attempting this. And that is absolutely fine. If I don’t manage to sort out my camera roll every week I end up forgetting about it and looking over it months later. This makes the job so much harder, not to mention my phone storage space completely filling up.

I recommend starting with a full clean up (and I will put together a step-by-step guide for this soon) and carrying out the tips in this blog post on a weekly basis as upkeep, to prevent your camera roll overfilling.

Tip 2 – Decluttering your pictures

The first step is to delete any photos you do not need. Go through your camera roll and find and delete all of the pictures that are taking up space unnecessarily. These types of pictures include

duplicate pictures (pick your favourite and delete the rest – I know how hard this can be trust me especially where your little one has done something super cute and each shot looks different in some way to you)
blurry pictures
pictures with motion or blinking in them (e.g. where your baby couldn’t stay still and is moving in each shot)
photos where someone has their eyes closed

This process literally makes everything simpler and the more ruthless you are the easier the rest of the tips will be.

Tip 3 – Favouriting your pictures

This step is important for those of you who are bloggers/ content creators/ digital creators etc and need to edit their pictures. Now you can do this step either as you are deleting your pictures – so you “favourite” the ones you will be editing – as you go through and delete. All you need to do is tap the heart icon underneath the picture. I’m an iPhone user (what a surprise eh) and this is the step Apple users can take. I am sure there is an equivalent “favourite” option for Android users too, so check your phone. Then all you have to do is select the “favourites” folder when you are importing them into your editing app. I like to use Lightroom Mobile as I find it to be the easiest ways to add presets to my pictures.

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Tip 4 – Creating special albums to organise your camera roll

The final step on how to organise your camera roll more efficiently is to create albums that work for you and your life. Some examples of albums I have added to my camera roll include:

Organising (pictures related to any organising projects I have done like a portfolio)
Family (personal pictures of my family)
Planners (need to share on my IG)
To Print (photos that I have edited and want to get printed)
To Edit (photos that I need to import into lightroom and edit)

Once I have edited the pictures I need to edit in Lightroom I then delete the original. This works for me but it may not be the solution for you so think about what is best for your routines life and business. All the pictures I want to keep a copy of but don’t necessarily need it on my camera roll anymore (once I have printed, or uploaded to IG), I save to my laptop and then an external hard drive as my back up! ALWAYS BACK UP your files.