My New Photo System!

order has been restored to my thousands of iPhone photos!

Photo by Noman Shahid on Unsplash

I mentioned here that one of my summer projects was to get every single photo on my (many) iPhones into Dropbox and onto an external drive. So far I’m working my way from 2017 to present day but the best thing to come out of this project is a new system that will help me clear the photo clutter in my phone every single month. While I was organizing and uploading the photos the system appeared.

Here’s what I did to divide the photos that I have already (on 4 different iPhones)¹.

1. Create a collection for every year in the photo app on my phone.

2. Within each collection create 12 albums, one for each month.

3. Search my photos for month and year and add the photos to their respective month and year. For example, June 2025 photos went into the 2025 collection, June 2025 album (the collections take up less space in your photos since all albums in a collection are behind the collection).

4. I upload the entire folder to dropbox under the year and month.

5. I then go through each month and delete photos I don’t need from my phone. I add the photos that I want to put on my thumb drive and print in a “To Print” folder.

6. I insert the thumb drive directly to my phone and upload the photos from the month that I want to keep.

7. The longest part is waiting for uploads on the thumb drive and into Dropbox. And the most tedious (but easy) part is searching for the months, selecting the photos and putting them into the folders. I have nine years to cover but the good news is the new system that I’ve created going forward will take me less than 10 minutes once each month and I’ll NEVER be here again going through almost a decades worth of photos!

My 2025 collection with monthly albums

So, going forward here is the plan.