Isn’t 8000 photos normal for a camera roll? I thought it was until very recently when someone mentioned that I may be a little trigger happy. But there’s a good reason for this—and here’s why I encourage you to mess up your camera roll too.
It may not be for most people but that’s about where I’ve been hovering for the last year or so. It may look like a total mess to some people but I prefer to call it an organized mess. It actually makes sense in my head, and I’m well aware of which photos are what, and why I keep each photo.
Folders help
Folders are available for a reason: to better organize your photos in your Camera Roll. Dividing your Camera Roll with folders greatly aids in organizing your photos, so use them to your advantage. By default, many of the apps you may have may create folders of their own once you save from the apps. That’s an easy way to find photos that you’ve edited with that app.
Why so many photos?
One of the advantages of shooting with an iPhone camera is the fact that it provides a number of different ways to take photos: timelapses, panorama, video, HDR, long exposure, and so forth. And with so many apps available for editing photos, there’s no shortages of experimental editing opportunities.
That’s precisely why I may take several photos of the same scene at once. I always make sure to alter the view a little, or change the exposure a little, or change the focus a little, from one photo to the next. So while it may seem like they are all the same photo, they are in fact different in many ways. Taking a look at the first row of photos below, they are very similar photos of the cherry blossoms, but with slightly different compositions.
How do you organize them?
After taking some photos, I later go back and look at the photos I took for that particular shoot, choose which one(s) I like the best and favourite them so they get put in to the Favorites folder. Those photos are the ones that I later edit and upload to Instagram or Twitter.
It’s a simple workflow, but one that meets my current needs. I just need to be more vigilant in deleting those photos that do not get favourited. My problem with this comes in my thinking that perhaps in the future, I can always use this photo in another project of some kind.
This could also be a good time to looking into backing up my Camera Roll to an external hard drive!