LONDON — The summer holidays are over, and all those great times you had on vacation have been memorialized in hundreds of smartphone photos. Now what?
Some highlights — the prettiest sunset, the best group shots — have been posted on Instagram or shared in the family chat group. But many more will likely languish in your camera roll.
Because smartphones come with increasingly large amounts of file storage, it’s too easy to take photos just because we can. But it’s also real work to go through them all later, so it’s too easy to forget about them.
Here are some quick and easy methods to help deal with the pictures (and videos) overwhelming your phone.
There will some shots that will be the most important — standout photos that you want to share with others, or know that you’ll look back on years later, or just keep for reference. Star or heart any photos that fall into this category, which puts them into a folder or album for favorites.
After a recent extended family trip to Turkey, I ended up with quite a few photos of restaurant and cafe menus. They were shared in the family WhatsApp group to decide where or what to eat. But we’ll probably never visit those establishments again.
It’s always good practice cull photos that you just don’t need anymore, which could also include screenshots, pictures of receipts or duplicate images. But going through hundreds of trip photos could be a little tedious without some help. Fortunately, there are dozens of photo deletion and cleanup apps available that aim to speed the job up.
Many of them resemble dating apps like Tinder, because they let you swipe left to delete and swipe right to save a photo. Some are free, others need a subscription.
It starts getting more challenging when you have images that are similar but not identical. Which one should you keep? Some apps have a comparison feature to help you decide.
I tried a few of these apps and found that Clever Cleaner’s Similars function works well, helping me whittle down, for example, many of the various nearly identical shots I took of Istanbul’s skyline while crossing the Bosphorus Strait by ferry at dusk. The free app grouped similar pictures together and then suggested the best shot to keep. I found that I generally agreed with its suggestions.
Even if you’ve managed to sort through your camera roll, it will probably still be a jumble of images stretching back in an unbroken stream.
So group photos into albums organized by themes. Android and iPhone users can do this on the Photos apps on their respective operating systems. Select all the photos from a trip and add them to a new album.
Planning ahead will make this process easier. Create an album when you start your trip, then save the photos there as you take them.
You can also create a shared album on Android or iPhone, which lets other people view or comment on photos or add their own.
If you don’t want to set up a shared album, Android and Google Photos lets users create links so others can just view an album or individual photo. It’s not so easy on iOS, which only lets users export the album’s photos. You can share individual photos with an iCloud link but it expires after 30 days.
Now that you’ve edited and curated your holiday pictures, consider taking an analog approach to showing them off.
Print them out and put them in an album that people can flip — not scroll — through. Or blow up the most eye-catching shot to frame and hang it as wall art.
Google Photos offers a photo book printing service that uses artificial intelligence to curate photos into generic themes, like Spring 2025, Memories, or They Grow Up So Fast, and generate basic no-frills layouts.
Other services like Mixbook and Shutterstock offer services that automatically generate more elaborately designed photobooks. Mixbook can even provide AI-generated photo captions, though the results might be, well, mixed.
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AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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