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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Physical photos may be outdated, but they’re important.
- With 22,000 pics in my account, it was overwhelming to start.
- There are several tricks to sort through your photos.
If you’re anything like me, you have a box of old family photos stuffed in a closet somewhere that’s one of your more important possessions. You pull them out from time to time and laugh and cry at memories you’d forgotten and pivotal moments in your family. Also, if you’re anything like me, you can’t remember the last time you printed a physical photo to preserve your own memories.
But you should probably get on that.
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I’ve always had an affinity for physical media. I spent more than a decade working at a newspaper, I had a DVD collection of more than 800 movies, and I still miss ticket stubs from sporting events and concerts. But for some reason, physical photos have remained mostly off my radar.
I trust Google Photos to keep my memories safe digitally, but when I’m gone, what will my kids have to look through and remember? Unless they have my login credentials and care enough to chase down my photos, not much. “Just printing them out” isn’t the easiest answer, though, since my Google Photos account dates back to 2016 and contains more than 22,000 photos and videos.
Like a lot of people, when I’m faced with an overwhelming decision, I’ll just decide that’s a problem for another day. If you’re in that same situation, here’s a look at four ways to jump-start the process.
How to sort your photos in the cloud
1. Micro-batch daily memories
If you don’t have time to wade through years of photos, let your cloud storage do the work. Every morning, Google Photos or Apple Photos will give you a “1 Year Ago Today” or “On This Day” notification. Take less than a minute to look through your photos from that day and either add your favorites to a dedicated album that you print through CVS, Walgreens, or Walmart, or add them directly to your Google Photos or Apple Photos cart. At the end of each month, order your cart.
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For Google Photos at least, prints are just 18 cents each plus shipping. You’ll be able to work through the vast majority of your library in just a year, and then you can print important memories as they come.
2. Start a ‘favorites’ system
The biggest hurdle when you’re wading through a decade of photos is everything but the photos — the screenshots, the blurry shot of your shoes, the picture of the parking deck floor you took to remember how to get home. If you’ve decided to print out your photos, start a dedicated favorites system. When you take pictures, if you have one you like, immediately heart or favorite it. That way, when you sit down to print, you can look through only the highlights.
3. Set up an automated service for now and work backward
Your backlog gets longer each month you don’t print anything, so start now. There are services like Chatbooks, Groovebook, and Google Photos Premium Print that automatically curate photos from your camera roll each month, print them, and mail them to you as mini books or loose photos for a small fee. These services either use your latest photos or pick the best ones, but you can choose your own as well.
4. Handle a year (or month) at a time
Google Photos makes it simple to pull up every photo from a certain year, and then every month from that year. Just type the year into the search bar, tap the entry that pops up, and you’ll see everything from that calendar year. I browsed through my earliest complete year, 2017, and it took less than 30 minutes to select a few 100 photos I’d like to see printed. If I did this just once a month, I’d work through my entire catalog in a year.
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Most photo printing services are pretty affordable — less than 20 cents a picture. But I frequently see promotions for places like CVS and Walgreens for even cheaper, or even free. For example, Walmart+ members get 25 free prints a month.
