I have a box in my closet. Inside: concert tickets from 2014, six dried-out marker drawings from a niece who is now in high school, a seashell from a beach whose name I have forgotten, and a hotel key card from a trip I barely remember taking.

It weighs about eight pounds. It has moved to three apartments with me. I have not opened it in four years. This summer I am finally dealing with it — and creating a system that does not fill another box.

Digitize the Physical Stuff

Take photos of tickets, cards, drawings, and other flat mementos. Use your phone — modern phone cameras are plenty good enough. Good lighting near a window, phone held steady, and you get a perfectly usable digital copy.

Put the photos in a folder called “Summer Memories 2026” on your phone or computer. I also back mine up to Google Photos. The physical items — unless they are genuinely irreplaceable — go in the recycling bin after they are digitized.

Three-dimensional items — that seashell, a rock, a small souvenir — photograph them and then let them go. A photo of a rock takes up zero space and lasts forever.

Create One Highlight Video

Instead of keeping 200 photos you will never scroll through, make a 2-minute video from the best 20 or 30. Most phones can do this in the built-in photo app. Add a song that reminds you of that summer.

I did this for last summer. The video is 90 seconds long. I have watched it four times this year. I have looked at the 200 original photos exactly zero times.

The One-Keepsake Rule

From each trip or each summer, keep one physical object. Not one box. One object. A single ticket. A single shell. A small thing that actually means something. Everything else gets photographed or filmed and let go.

This rule forced me to ask: “What actually matters from this experience?” Most of what was in my box did not make the cut. A few things — a note my wife wrote me on a napkin, one really good photo printed at CVS — earned their place.

Write It Down

A one-paragraph summary of a trip or summer day captures more than a photograph. Write it in a notes app while it is fresh. “July 12 — drove to the lake, water was too cold to swim, ate sandwiches on the dock, saw a bald eagle.” That paragraph brings back more memories than any photo of the lake.