Do you have a vast collection of digital photos? Are you feeling overwhelmed? Is your mobile device or computer running out of space? If so, it’s time to take control and cull your digital photos like a pro!
The term ‘culling’ in photography means to get rid of the bad images, so those remaining are the ones you want to preserve and share.
Maintaining your photo collection can be time-consuming. This makes most people postpone the task (while they continue to add to their collection by taking more photos!). But there are some things you can do to make the task quicker, enjoyable, and efficient.
The biggest reason that you need to cull your collection of photos is this: The sheer number you’ve accumulated—and continue to add—is just not sustainable. If you aren’t a professional photographer, there’s no need to have tens of thousands of photos. Who’s going to look at them all?
Unless you have an important archive of cultural/social/historical significance, too many photos are just digital clutter. Culling your photos to a manageable number is something to work towards. Plus, future generations will thank you!
Also, the key to keeping your photo collection organized is to cull them regularly, which is what the pros do.
What types of photos to weed out of your collection
The aim of culling your photos can vary from person to person, but there are a few commonalities. These types of images contribute to the sense of overwhelm:
Duplicate and redundant photos
Screenshots, photos attached to text messages, low-resolution social media photos
Poor quality or blurry photos
Photos that have lost meaning (for example, grocery lists, where you parked, that great mixed drink…)
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you review your collection and consider images to keep and which to remove:
What is the purpose of this photo?
Is this a high-quality image?
Does this photo tell a story?
Does the photo make me feel something?
Do I care about the subject (s) in the photo?
Is this photo redundant?
Why culling your photos first makes sense
It’s important to cull your photos before you edit (and ‘edit’ here means cropping, enhancing, fixing the exposure, adding filters, etc.) to avoid being overwhelmed with choices and making mistakes. Culling unwanted photos also frees up room on your hard drive.
Here’s a scenario: Let’s say you’ve returned from a family vacation with 900 photos. To sit and review all of those in one session and decide which to edit and share will take a long time—and chances are, you’ll procrastinate.
Here’s the trick: Cull first, then review and edit after. This avoids the rabbit hole of lingering over the best photos and getting distracted. Choose the ones to delete first. Delete those blurry, bad, redundant and screenshot photos. Don’t linger. This should be a quick and easy process.
The cull-as-you-go approach
You can cull your photos whenever you have a quiet moment or a little downtime. If you’ve been traveling, cull later that day, after you’ve taken a series of photos. We use this practice, and it’s become second nature. If you take a few minutes to cull here and there, you avoid a backlog, which can take hours when you find the time to do it.
We also recommend reviewing your collection once a month, starting with the previous month’s photos. We do our culling the first week of the month. Be sure to pick a day and time that works for you, and that you can commit to. We’ve found it’s ideal to piggyback this new habit with an old one, such as right after paying monthly bills.
Helpful tools for keeping your photo collection manageable
Here are some of the most popular culling and editing tools for your digital photo collection:
for beginners
Adobe Bridge + Adobe Elements. These programs are a great way to organize, cull, and enhance your photos and videos. They are perfect for everyday consumers and non-pros. Bridge is free and Elements is a flat fee of $100 (no subscription needed).
more advanced
Adobe Photoshop + Adobe Lightroom. We use both programs in our professional photo organizing business and for personal projects. Photoshop is a robust tool that comes with outstanding features, such as color correction, cropping, red-eye removal, and more. We use Lightroom for organizing, adding metadata, flagging favorite images, and deleting the ones that don’t work. These two programs are part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, which requires a monthly subscription, and have a steeper learning curve than Bridge and Elements.
for everyone—especially as you get started
Duplicate removal apps such as Photo Sweeper or Photo Culling are great options to use when you first decide to tackle downsizing your digital photo collection.
Both apps filter your photos and present the ones to be deleted, depending on the parameters you’ve chosen (no apps that we know of will auto-delete your photos; that’s your job!). Of course, if you practice regular culling, your collection will be much more manageable and your review session will be much quicker.
Your photo collection is smaller—now what?
Once you have narrowed down your collection, congratulations! You are now ready to enjoy your photos without a sense of overwhelm (especially if you have a well-organized collection). You will be able to find just the photo you want without scrolling through ten thousand files first!
As a bonus, a tidier photo collection makes it easy to create custom photo gifts such as books, slideshows, and framed prints (perfect for holidays, birthdays, or any gift-worthy milestone).
Remember: Make regular culling a habit, and you won’t feel that sense of digital overwhelm again.
Marci Brennan is a certified professional photo organizer who can restore cherished memories and create cohesive, thoughtfully curated media libraries. Her company Past Present Pix is based in Queens, NY.