Photos & Videos

How to Share Photo Albums With Family Without Endless Group Texts
How to Share Photo Albums With Family Without Endless Group Texts
Somebody takes 80 photos at a family gathering. They text 12 of them. Three other people text their favorites. Now there's a group thread with 40 compressed images scattered between... Read more...
How to Organize Video Files So You Can Find That One Clip
How to Organize Video Files So You Can Find That One Clip
Photos have gotten easy to find. Type "beach 2019" into any modern photo app and it works, because software can look inside a photo and recognize what's in it. Video... Read more...
How to Move a Photo Library to a New Phone or Computer Safely
How to Move a Photo Library to a New Phone or Computer Safely
Device migration is when photo libraries get lost. Not dramatically — nobody watches 30,000 photos disappear. It happens quietly: a transfer that reported success but skipped 400 files, an album... Read more...
External Drive vs NAS vs Cloud for Photo Storage
External Drive vs NAS vs Cloud for Photo Storage
Every photo storage article eventually arrives at the same question: where should this actually live? The answer is almost never one of the three. It's a combination, and which combination... Read more...
A 30-Day Photo Organization Plan (15 Minutes a Day)
A 30-Day Photo Organization Plan (15 Minutes a Day)
The reason photo organization projects fail isn't difficulty. It's that they're conceived as one enormous weekend, and no weekend is ever enormous enough. You start, you get a quarter of... Read more...
How to Build a Digital Family Archive Your Kids Will Actually Keep
How to Build a Digital Family Archive Your Kids Will Actually Keep
Here's the uncomfortable premise: most carefully built family photo archives don't survive their creator. Not because the drive fails, though it might. Because someone dies, and their kids find a... Read more...
What to Do With Screenshots, the Fastest-Growing Folder on Your Phone
What to Do With Screenshots, the Fastest-Growing Folder on Your Phone
Check your screenshot count right now. On iPhone: Photos → Albums → Media Types → Screenshots. On Android: Library → Screenshots. Most people find somewhere between 800 and 5,000. Almost... Read more...
How to Cull Photos Fast: The 4-Pass Method for Big Libraries
How to Cull Photos Fast: The 4-Pass Method for Big Libraries
Culling is where photo organization projects go to die. You open a folder of 4,000 vacation photos determined to clean it up. Twenty minutes later you've evaluated maybe sixty images,... Read more...
A Photo Naming System That Still Works in 10 Years
A Photo Naming System That Still Works in 10 Years
Most photo naming advice assumes you'll keep using the same software forever. Then Picasa shuts down, or you switch from Windows to Mac, or a service exports your library as... Read more...
How to Compress Videos Without Wrecking the Quality
How to Compress Videos Without Wrecking the Quality
A twenty-minute recording of your kid's recital is 8 GB. You want to email it, or fit it on a drive, or stop it from eating your cloud storage. So... Read more...
Google Photos vs Apple Photos vs Amazon Photos
Google Photos vs Apple Photos vs Amazon Photos
These three services do broadly the same job, get photos off your phone, back them up, make them searchable, but they differ in ways that matter a lot depending on... Read more...
How to Fix Wrong Dates on Scanned and Imported Photos
How to Fix Wrong Dates on Scanned and Imported Photos
You scan two hundred family photos and they all land in your library dated today, sandwiched between a grocery receipt and a picture of your dog. Or you find a... Read more...
Photo Metadata Basics: How Dates, Locations, and Tags Work
Photo Metadata Basics: How Dates, Locations, and Tags Work
Every photo you take carries a hidden layer of information: when it was taken, what camera took it, sometimes exactly where you were standing. This is metadata, and it's the... Read more...
How to Scan Old Family Photos and Actually Organize Them
How to Scan Old Family Photos and Actually Organize Them
Most people who start scanning family photos never finish. They scan forty pictures in a burst of enthusiasm, dump them in a folder called scans, and stop. Two years later... Read more...
The 3-2-1 Rule for Photos: Backing Up Pictures in Three Places
The 3-2-1 Rule for Photos: Backing Up Pictures in Three Places
Almost everyone who has lost a photo library thought they were covered. They had it "on the computer," or "in iCloud," or "on a hard drive." One copy, one failure... Read more...
How to Free Up Phone Space Without Deleting Memories
How to Free Up Phone Space Without Deleting Memories
Your phone says storage is full. It suggests deleting photos. This is almost always the wrong first move, because photos are usually not the biggest problem — they're just the... Read more...
Photo File Formats Explained: JPEG, PNG, HEIC, and RAW
Photo File Formats Explained: JPEG, PNG, HEIC, and RAW
Most people never think about file formats until something breaks — a photo won't open on a friend's computer, a website rejects an upload, a print comes back looking wrong,... Read more...
How to Find and Delete Duplicate Photos on Any Device
How to Find and Delete Duplicate Photos on Any Device
Duplicate photos are the single biggest source of wasted storage in most people's libraries. In a typical collection that's been copied from a camera to a laptop to a drive... Read more...
The Best Folder Structure for Photo Libraries (With Real Examples)
The Best Folder Structure for Photo Libraries (With Real Examples)
There is no universally correct way to organize photos. There is, however, a way that survives contact with reality — and several that look elegant on paper and fall apart... Read more...
How to Organize 20 Years of Digital Photos Without Losing Your Mind
How to Organize 20 Years of Digital Photos Without Losing Your Mind
If you've been taking digital photos since the mid-2000s, you probably have somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 of them. They're on an old laptop, a phone, two external drives, a... Read more...