How to Declutter Digital Photos: 7 Simple Steps to Organize Your Pictures

Inside: Learn how to declutter digital photos so that you can easily access your pictures without feeling overwhelmed.

When you think about clutter, you probably think about the physical stuff that surrounds you. The pile of mail on the counter, the junk drawer in the kitchen, the closet stuffed with things you never actually use but haven’t gotten around to throwing away…

But clutter extends to the digital world, too. Our email inboxes can easily become cluttered with advertisements we don’t want to see, newsletters we once subscribed to but no longer read, and various other types of junk and spam. 

Something else that has become a major culprit for clutter? Our digital photos. And it’s easy to see why. Modern cell phones can take top-quality pictures, automatically saving them to your device or the cloud. And there’s virtually no limit to the number you can take.

Many of us have gotten into the habit of photographing everything – from important and meaningful family memories to miscellaneous things we see on the street.

We take multiple versions of the same photo – because why not? And while it’s easy to take those pictures, most of us aren’t really in the habit of going through them and cleaning them up.

The result?

A digital mess of disorganized pictures. Thousands upon thousands of files take up space on your device. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the state of your digital photos and want to get them organized for good – I’ve got you covered. Keep reading to uncover the steps to declutter your digital photos and finally get them organized.

How to Declutter Digital Photos: 7 Steps to Organize Your Pictures

If you have boxes of physical photos you don’t know what to do with, check out this post on how to declutter pictures in your home. You can also find tips on how to digitize old photos to preserve your memories.

And if you’re overwhelmed by the digital photo clutter that’s accumulated on your devices making it difficult to locate what you’re looking for? Follow these 7 steps to declutter your digital photos and get them organized.

Step 1: Consolidate your photos. 

The first thing you should do is make sure your photos are all in the same place. Similar to decluttering your home, it’s much easier to accomplish the task when you can truly see the scope of what you’re trying to deal with. 

First, search all of your devices and figure out where your photos are lurking. They might be saved to your computer, to your phone, to your cloud storage, on your tablet, on an external hard drive – or even on old SSD cards. 

Once you know where all of your photos are, pick a single place to store them all – like a single folder on your computer. 

Step 2: Back up your photos.

Before you start deleting files, it’s a good idea to create a backup of all of your photos. That way, if you accidentally delete something you don’t mean to, you’ve got a copy safely stored away.

Cloud storage solutions like Google Drive or iCloud are great options – they’re free and easy to access if needed. 

To keep your system organized and neat, replace your backup after you’re done decluttering and organizing your images.

Step 3: Delete duplicates and poor-quality images.

After your photos are safely backed up, it’s time to get started. 

When you’re decluttering a physical room, one of the first things you should do is get rid of any trash. This is precisely what you should do with your digital photos.

Chances are, you have tons of repeat images with minor variations of the same picture. Most people also have blurry, out-of-focus shots, accidental photos we didn’t mean to take, and photos of things that you can immediately see you don’t want to keep – for example, a photo of your grocery list. 

I’ve found I’m much more efficient with this process on my computer rather than my phone. It’s easier to see the images and click on numerous ones to delete at once.

Working through your photos from oldest to newest, delete those duplicates and junk photos. Most people have quite a few of them!

Fair warning – this process may take quite a bit of time if you’ve had a lot of pictures pile up over the years. It can feel tedious so spreading it out over time is a better approach.

Just like with any type of decluttering, the goal is to keep your favorites and get rid of the excess. If you use Google Photos, they have built-in tools to help you clean up and organize your photos.

This is the most important step for organizing your photos as it will reduce your digital clutter and make your pictures easier to access.

Step 4: Decide how you want to store your photos. 

After your initial cleanup, you’ll have a much more manageable number of pictures.

Now, before you organize the ones you’d like to keep, it’s important to consider how you want those photos to be organized and create folders to support that. 

Some people like to organize photos chronologically, with dedicated folders for photos from specific years. This is how I prefer to organize my photos.

Other people prefer to categorize pictures by events – vacation pictures, nature pictures, pictures of your kid’s school events. 

You can be as specific or as broad as you want here. As long as you choose a structure that you can commit to that lets you find what you’re looking for, you’ve accomplished the task at hand. 

Step 5: Sort your photos.

Now that you’ve determined your categories and created folders, it’s time to file away your pictures.

In most cases, you can simply drag and drop your photos into the right folders, making this a fairly quick and easy task.

Feel free to create new folders – or subfolders – along the way to keep things tidy. Just don’t go overboard with the folders as having to click through 7 folders to try and find a picture would be a bit annoying.

Step 6: Rename and tag your photos for easy searching. 

Our phones aren’t smart enough to give our photos meaningful names. Instead, they’re named with a jumble of letters and numbers that are virtually meaningless when it comes to identifying the photo itself.

After your photos are sorted into their folders, take your organization one step further by naming the pictures. Again, choose a naming convention that makes sense to you. It might include the date, or keywords to describe who’s in the picture or where it was taken. 

Another smart thing you can do to stay organized? Tag your photos! Most cloud storage platforms allow you to create tags to more easily sort and search your photos.

You can create any tags you want and there’s usually no limit on how many tags you add to a single picture. This makes it a great option when you have lots of photos to filter through.

Step 7: Make a plan to keep your photos organized.

Now that you’ve decluttered and organized your digital photos, make a plan to keep them that way.

Commit to deleting unneeded photos as soon as you take them and reviewing new pictures on a daily or weekly basis. This will help you stay on top of your digital photos so that you don’t reaccumulate clutter.

When you develop decluttering habits it keeps things clutter-free so you don’t end up back where you started.

Decluttering your digital photos will help you to get more storage space back on your devices so they can run more smoothly.

The end goal is to make your memories easily accessible so that you can revisit them without feeling stressed or overwhelmed.

What are your favorite tips on how to declutter digital photos? Share them in the comments section below.

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