23 July 2026
Everyone reaches a point where the camera roll stops being a collection and starts being a pile. You do not need to sort all of it. You need to get a couple of hundred out.
Open Settings, then General, then iPhone Storage, and look at what Photos is using. For a lot of people it is more than everything else on the phone combined. Ten years of a family, a few thousand screenshots, and four hundred nearly identical pictures of the same child on the same beach.
The instinct is to sort it out properly. Go through the lot, bin the rubbish, organise the rest into albums. Almost nobody finishes. The pile is too big and the job has no visible end, so it gets abandoned somewhere around 2019 and never picked up again.
A better plan is to stop trying to fix the whole thing.
The deleting that is worth doing
There is a small amount of tidying that pays for itself, and none of it involves photos of your family.
Search these in the Photos app and delete without agonising:
- Screenshots. Search the word. You will probably find several thousand and almost none are worth keeping.
- Burst frames. Photos keeps every frame unless told otherwise. One good one out of thirty is plenty.
- Whiteboards, receipts, parking bay numbers, wifi passwords. Everyone has hundreds and they all served their purpose within a day.
- Long videos you have never once watched back. These eat more space than a thousand photos.
Check this before you start deleting
Deleting on your phone deletes from iCloud and from every other device signed into the same account. Photo sync is not a backup. If something matters, it needs to exist somewhere that does not vanish the moment you tap delete.
Back it up properly
iCloud keeps your photos available. It does not protect you from your own mistakes, from losing access to the account, or from a subscription lapsing while you are not paying attention.
The rule people in the business use is three copies, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else. For a family that usually means the phone, an external drive at home, and a cloud service. It is dull, nobody does it until they have already lost something, and doing it badly is still enormously better than not doing it.
Get some of them out
A camera roll is a filing cabinet nobody opens. Ask anyone what happened to the photographs from their own childhood and they will describe an album on a shelf at their parents' house, because that is the format that survives being looked at.
You do not need to print forty thousand photos. Two hundred is plenty for a year. The hard part is choosing them, which is the same wall people hit when they try to sort the camera roll in the first place.
Choosing without losing a weekend
Doing it by hand, this is the fastest route I know:
- 1Pick a window. One year, or one summer. Anything open-ended turns straight back into the original problem.
- 2Go month by month rather than photo by photo. Take the best two or three from each month and move on.
- 3Favourite as you go instead of deleting. Deciding what to keep is much quicker than deciding what to bin.
- 4Stop at around two hundred. Past that, nobody looks at the back half of the book.
That is roughly two evenings of work. Which is honest rather than encouraging.
Or hand the choosing over
This is what our app does. It reads the camera roll on the phone, scores the photos, and picks up to 240 of the best across whatever period you choose. It looks for faces and for the frames that came out well, and it spreads the selection across the whole year on purpose, so one fortnight in Cornwall does not swallow the book.
Every photo it picks has a person in it. Landscapes and empty rooms get left out unless you add them back, which you can. Nothing is fixed until you order, so you can swap any photo, move it around, change the title and pick a cover colour.
The book is 48 pages, eight inches square, and £39.99 with UK delivery included. No subscription. iPhone only for now.