Protect your photos
Protect old photos from a house move: what to back up before you pack
Photo albums and hard drives can be lost or damaged during a move. What to digitise and back up before moving day.
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Protect your photos
Recover photos after accidentally deleting an entire album
Most services keep deleted albums recoverable in a Trash or Recently Deleted folder for a limited time. How to find and restore them.
Protect your photos
What to do if you suspect a backup has been silently failing
How to check the actual date a backup last ran, and the common silent causes behind a stalled photo backup.
Protect your photos
Check that a paid cloud storage plan is actually renewing, not lapsing
How to check your billing settings directly, since an expired card can quietly lapse a paid storage plan without you noticing.
Protect your photos
Protect photos from being overwritten by an automatic cloud sync
How an automatic sync can occasionally overwrite an edited photo with an older version, and how to avoid it.
Protect your photos
What happens to shared photos when someone leaves a shared album
What typically happens to your own saved photos and your access when someone leaves a shared photo album.
Organise your photos
Separate photos worth keeping from ones worth letting go
A simple, consistent way to sort your photo collection into what's worth keeping and what isn't, without agonising over every photo.
Organise your photos
Build a simple timeline for a family photo collection
How to arrange a family photo collection into a simple chronological timeline using folders, without special software.
Organise your photos
Tag photos by decade when exact dates are unknown
How to sort undated old photos into decades using visual clues, when you don't know the exact date they were taken.
Organise your photos
Rename a whole folder of scanned photos in one batch
How to rename every photo in a folder at once, in a consistent pattern, using tools already built into Windows and Mac.
Organise your photos
Split a huge single folder of unsorted photos into a usable structure
How to tackle a huge unsorted photo folder without feeling overwhelmed, by working through it in manageable batches.
Organise your photos
Keep a simple back-catalogue of who appears in which old photos
How to record who appears in old family photos while the people who remember are still around to help.
Organise your photos
Organise photos that arrived as email or messaging-app attachments
How to save and organise photos that arrive as email or messaging-app attachments, before they get lost or deleted.
Organise your photos
Set naming rules the whole family can follow for new photos
How to agree on a simple photo naming rule the whole family will actually stick to.
Organise your photos
Organise photos taken on a shared family trip from several phones
How to combine everyone's trip photos from different phones into one tidy, shared collection.
Organise your photos
Build a "best of" album from a large family collection
How to pick out a manageable, enjoyable selection of standout photos from a large family photo collection.
Organise your photos
Keep captions and photos together when moving between apps
How to stop photo captions getting lost when you move photos from one app or service to another.
Organise your photos
Organise photos by location when your device didn't record it
How to sort photos by place using visual clues and memory, when your camera or phone didn't save the location.
Organise your photos
Set up a folder structure for a family photo collection from scratch
A simple, easy-to-maintain folder structure for organising a family photo collection from the ground up.
Organise your photos
Merge two people's overlapping photo collections without duplicating everything
How to safely combine two people's photo collections into one, without ending up with a mess of duplicate photos.
Organise your photos
Sort a phone's camera roll before it gets backed up
How to quickly tidy your camera roll before it backs up, so clutter doesn't pile up in your cloud storage too.
Organise your photos
Organise a mixed folder of photos and screenshots
How to separate screenshots from real photos and sort each group in a way that actually makes sense.
Organise your photos
Keep track of which photos have been shared with which relatives
A simple way to log who you've shared which photos with, so you don't lose track or accidentally send things twice.
Organise your photos
Group photos by event instead of by date when dates are missing
How to sort undated photos into meaningful groups based on the event they show, rather than trying to force a date onto them.