There is a conversation that comes around every so often, usually when a film or a documentary puts the idea of a final image in front of us: the last photograph taken of someone, the frame nobody knew was the last. It sounds sentimental until you open your own phone and realise you cannot find a single decent picture of your mother from the last two years, but you have forty-one nearly identical shots of a lunch you no longer remember eating.
That is not a moral failing. It is simply what happens when the camera lives in your pocket and storage feels infinite. The fix is not to take fewer pictures. It is to spend one evening, perhaps two, deciding which ones you actually want to keep — and then getting a handful of them out of the glass and onto paper, where they can be picked up.
Start with people, not with dates
Most photo-tidying advice tells you to work chronologically, which is precisely why most people give up somewhere around a holiday four years ago. Try the opposite. Open your photo app, search for one person by name or face, and scroll only through them. Ask a single question of each image: would I want this in a frame, an album, or a message to them on a bad day?
Do this for the five or six people who matter most, and you will have gathered the core of a family archive in under an hour. You will also notice the gaps immediately — the relative who is always behind the camera, the teenager who has hidden from it for two years, the friend who exists only in blurry group shots. Those gaps are the useful part. They tell you what to photograph next weekend.
