The two-folder system that survives real life
Complicated filing structures collapse because nobody maintains them. Two albums are enough. The first is Keepers: the images you would be genuinely sorry to lose. The second is Print Queue: a smaller, rotating selection of ten to twenty you intend to have developed. Everything else can stay where it is, unsorted, harmless.
Once a month — pair it with something you already do, like paying a bill or changing the bedding — spend ten minutes moving a few pictures into Keepers. Once a season, send the Print Queue off to be printed and empty it. This is how an archive builds itself: not in a heroic weekend, but in small deposits.
Photograph the ordinary on purpose
Look at any old family album and the pictures that catch you are rarely the posed ones. They are the kitchen mid-chaos, the dog on someone's lap, a grandmother's hands doing something she did every day. We have been trained by social media to photograph the highlights, which is why so many phones are full of sunsets and so short of Tuesday.
Make a small practice of it. Once a week, take one picture of something entirely unremarkable: the hallway with everyone's shoes in it, your partner reading, the view from the bus stop where you wait every morning. Put those straight into Keepers. In ten years they will be the images that hurt in the good way.
