How I ended up with 111,582 photos on my iPhone, and what to do about it
By Harry McCracken | Published: 2025-10-31 16:27:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
Greetings and thank you again for reading Fast company‘s connected-Happy Halloween to you.
I recently used Apple Photos to revisit photos I took over the 2015 Thanksgiving holiday. There were some gems there, memories I want to keep forever, but there were even more photos I regret saving in the first place.
You already know the people I’m talking about. Close duplicates of other images are better. Misty misses. Shots of people with their eyelids drooping or their mouths open. The one I accidentally picked up off the floor when my thumb slipped.
Did I mention that precious photos of loved ones remain intertwined with detritus like the shot I took of the fine print on the back of my mother’s wireless network extender when I was troubleshooting it?
Of course, all this is an artifact of the era of digital photography. For me, it started in the spring of 1999, when I bought my first digital camera. Freed from film and development costs, I could take as many photos as I wanted (or at least as many as my memory card could hold). It quickly piled up on my hard drive in a way nothing ever happened with printed snapshots.
The arrival of smartphones in the following decade was perhaps the most significant sea change. Suddenly, I had a good camera with me all the time. It synced all the photos I took to the cloud, so it was nearly impossible for them to be misplaced.
Nice to know I don’t lose photos by accident — which I did all the time before using a smartphone — the 111,582 photos I currently have stored in Apple Photos, most of which I took using various iPhones, contain huge amounts of dross. I spend $10 a month on 2TB of iCloud storage to store it, but cost isn’t the issue. It’s the mental toll I pay every time I have to sift through bad photos to find good ones.
Speaking of “goodies”: starting in 2023, an app called GoodOnes I tried to use artificial intelligence to distinguish between your best photos and those that you can safely delete. Later It was rebranded as Ollie It has since disappeared from the App Store. (Her website says there’s a new version coming, but it includes a link to a broken waitlist, so who knows?)
I tried GoodOnes when they were new. For the most part, Lee demonstrated that determining whether a photo is worth keeping often has little to do with aspects that AI might be able to judge, such as composition, clarity, or expressions on faces. In many cases, this is a very personal decision, and impossible to outsource.
Even when you decide to get rid of your unwanted photos, it is very difficult to do so. Apple Photos is focused on storing photos securely, and it doesn’t seem to have put much thought into this no Store it. Every time you delete a photo, it makes you confirm your intention, explaining that you can restore it for 30 days. Doing this thousands of times would not only be hard work – it would be unbearable. (It’s possible to select a large group of photos to delete, but they are displayed as small cropped boxes, making it difficult to tell if any particular photo is saved or worthless.)
This conundrum is clear enough because Apple’s App Store contains several third-party utilities designed to let you keep or delete photos by swiping, as if you were swiping through potential dates on Tinder. The one I like best — and I’m happy to pay $3 a month for it — is called Declutter shutter. It has a likable, simple interface and uses notifications to gently nudge you to spend a few minutes with it. It also makes the deletion process less intimidating by only offering photos you’ve taken on today’s date in years past, though you can also move on to others if you’re feeling ambitious.
Sorting through 100,000 old photos is extremely stressful, so the most immediate response is to avoid doing it at all. But I can definitely find the time to review the photos I took on February 3, June 12, or October 30. I’ve already used Shutter Declutter to get rid of thousands of nasty things. It was. . . It’s kind of fun, especially since I’ll also get to see some cool photos that I forgot I took.
Besides using this app regularly, I try to follow some personal best practices for managing my photo collection:
First, I do my best Take fewer photos, but better photos. Instead of shooting dozens of random takes of a moment just because I can, I prefer to compose two or three of them thoughtfully, as if I were paying for the film and processing.
Secondly, when I take a group of photos – for example, on a hike or during an e-bike ride – I try Reviewed shortly thereafter. I usually end up deleting about 80% of what I captured, leaving me with the 20% that I’ll be happy to rediscover years from now.
Finally, my Apple Photos are filled with photos that are inherently disposable: close-ups of restaurant meals, most screenshots, and somewhat amusing snapshots I’ve sent to friends or family. Instead of letting it fester, I always remind myself that it’s better to do so Remove them quicklyas if I were taking out the trash.
I will never turn myself into a stylish digital geek. But even if all I do is slow the accumulation of additional images, I will have accomplished something. After all, it would be very sad if I reviewed Apple Photos one day and discovered that instead of having 111,582 to argue with, I somehow had 223,164.
You’ve been reading Unplugged, fast companyThe weekly technology newsletter from me, Global Technology Editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwards this issue to you — or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com — you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I’d love to hear from you: Email me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your comments and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodonand TopicsAnd you can He follows connected On flipboard.
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(tags for translation)iphone
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