Last week as part of the GET-YOUR-PHONE-PHOTOS-UNDER-CONTROL challenge, we deleted all of the junk.

So! How’d you do? Did you get through all of your photos? Were you ruthless? Did you Marie Kondo it all and only keep what brought you joy?

I deleted over 5,000 photos. 🎉

I hope you’re feeling lighter already.

Now you have all these keeper-photos, but there still in one big mish mash (don’t worry, I’m right there with you!).

This week, our task is CREATE FUNCTIONAL ALBUMS.

It’s time to take what you have left and organize the shit out of it.

I could give you a list of specific albums to create, but honestly, that’s not the best way to do it. You need to figure out for yourself what will work best. It’s going to depend on what your life looks like and what you use your phone for.

Your phone likely already arranges them into months and years. So, maybe it’d be helpful to create albums for vacations, family memories, recipes, books to read, kid activity ideas, home decor, etc.

If you edit photos on your phone, it can also be really helpful to create a TO BE EDITED album so you know what needs doing.

As I use my phone a lot for my work, my albums will also be divided into categories to post to IG, Story highlight covers, self portraits, etc.

Now, before you get going with creating your albums, I recommend that you go in and figure out what albums you already have. Many apps (like Snapseed, VSCO, etc) will automatically create albums for you and they’re next to useless. So, go ahead and delete any of those albums you don’t need. Deleting an album shouldn’t (on iPhones it for sure doesn’t) delete the photos – it just removes the album.

Once those are cleaned up, then start your new album list. Then, go through your freshly cleaned photos and start adding them to albums.

Again, this will be a multi-day activity. I recommend starting at the top of your camera roll and selecting in chunks, then adding chunks of photos to certain albums. For example, go through and select EVERY vacation photo and then add that to the vacation album. That’ll be much faster than doing one photo to one album at a time. Each day, work on filling up a few albums.

Want to rearrange your albums. You can do that! If you’re on an iPhone, click EDIT from the main album page, then tap and hold the album you want to move and drag it to its new spot.

Ok. Off you go categorizing.

I’ll be back next week with your final task!