My phone told me I had 14,732 photos. I checked my cloud storage. Another 6,000 from old phones I had transferred over the years. Somewhere in that mess were actual memories. Most of it was screenshots of recipes I never made, blurry concert videos I never rewatched, and forty-seven nearly identical pictures of my cat.

I kept telling myself I would sort through them “when I had time.” I had time during the pandemic and did not do it. So I blocked off one weekend, accepted that I would hate every minute of it, and actually did the thing.

The four-folder system

Create four folders or albums. Name them Keep, Maybe, Archive, and Trash. Every photo goes into one of these. No exceptions. No “I will decide later.”

Keep: photos you want on your phone. Family, friends, important documents, the top three cat pictures not forty-seven.

Maybe: photos you are not sure about. Review this folder at the end. Force yourself to move every single one to Keep or Trash before you call the project done.

Archive: photos you want to keep but do not need on your phone. Old travel photos, event pictures, sentimental screenshots. Move these to an external hard drive or cloud cold storage.

Trash: duplicates, blurry shots, screenshots you will never reference again, memes from 2019. Delete without mercy.

The speed trick: sort by month

Do not scroll endlessly. Go to your camera roll by month — every phone has this view. Pick a month, swipe through rapidly, and decide in under one second per photo. Trust your instinct. If you hesitate, it goes in Maybe.

I got through about 2,000 photos an hour this way. The whole project took roughly ten hours split across two days. That sounds like a lot. It is. But I had been putting it off for literally a decade, so ten hours felt like a bargain.

What I wish I had known before starting

Do not do this on your phone. The screen is too small and the touch interface slows you down. Use a computer. Import everything to your desktop photo app and sort there with a mouse and keyboard. It is three times faster.

Delete in batches. On iPhone, select a batch of about 500 photos and hit delete. Do not delete one by one. On Android, same thing — select all and trash.

Back up before you start. If you accidentally delete something important in a batch, you want a safety net. Do a full backup to a computer or cloud first. It takes an hour and saves you the panic of realizing you deleted your grandmother’s birthday photos.

After that weekend I had 2,300 photos on my phone and 8,000 in cold storage. My phone storage bar went from red to less than half full. Every time I open my camera roll now, I only see pictures I actually want to look at.