Declutter Your Photo Life: Curating, Preserving, Organizing, and Sharing Your Photos

by Adam Pratt

Turn your photo chaos into precious memories to be enjoyed and shared!

Now more than ever, we hold our photo collections dear. They are often some of our most prized possessions. Wouldn’t it be great to finally have all your photos organized, safe, accessible, findable, and shareable? With Declutter Your Photo Life by your side, you have just what you need to achieve photo bliss.

Photographers and family historians understand the immense power that photographs have to convey meaning, emotion, and memory. We cherish both old film photos that were handed down by previous generations and our latest digital photos captured on the newest smartphone. But when those priceless memories are unorganized and scattered every which way—on a smartphone, on a laptop, on memory cards and flash drives, on two or three photo sharing websites, in photo albums, and in shoeboxes in the attic—the dominant feeling quickly goes from “overjoyed” to “overwhelmed.” What a mess!

Whether you’re a professional photographer, a casual shooter, or the designated family historian, Declutter Your Photo Life will help you organize and enjoy your photos once again, as well as create cherished keepsakes for friends and family. In this book, professional photo organizer, photographer, and author Adam Pratt teaches you his straightforward step-by-step workflow that will have you taking complete control and creating a calming order out of your photo chaos. And once you’ve mastered Adam’s system—Gather, Preserve, Organize, Share, Maintain—you’ll have all the tools you need to keep your photo treasure organized as you move forward.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Why You Should Organize Your Photos
Chapter 2: Using a Workflow
Chapter 3: Gathering Photos
Chapter 4: Preserving Photos
Chapter 5: Converting Digital Formats
Chapter 6: Scanning Physical Photos
Chapter 7: Curating Photos
Chapter 8: Organizing Photos
Chapter 9: Dating Photos
Chapter 10: Sharing Photos
Chapter 11: Accessing Your Photo Archive
Chapter 12: Maintaining Your Photo Archive
Chapter 13: Learning From Your Photo Archive
Chapter 14: Tips for Easier Organizing

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, Reference, How To

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 23, 2022

Reviews

[Zaira's Bookshelf · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really helpful! I've been wanting to get ahold of my photo collection, but it's so overwhelming.

My only wish is that it didn't rely so heavily on Adobe apps. They're pricy, so there were some things I couldn't do. Maybe someday. I hope in ten years or so, the author will come out with a new edition. If he does, I'd definitely pick it up.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

[I read the paperback from Rockynook, not the ebook.]

I am the perfect audience for this book: Declutter Your Photo Life: Curating, Preserving, Organizing, and Sharing Your Photos by Adam Pratt

Over the past 10 years, I have been slowly digitizing my old family photos and trying to properly organize all my digital images. For the past two years, I have been slowly working to collect, organize, and manage all my images in Adobe Lightroom and this is still very much an ongoing project!

The workflow outlined in the book is based on Adobe Lightroom, so I felt at home reading the book. If you do not use Lightroom, the workflow outlined in the book would still be applicable to any other full featured DAM type application used to manage large photo collections.

In reading Declutter Your Photo Life, I was able to validate a lot of what I was doing informally, but more importantly the book has helped me crystalize how want to organize and manage my images going forward.

Overall the books is an easy and straightforward read and if you are interested in tackling preserving old photos while managing all your digital images, then I would highly recommend this book.

[jimtown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Pratt has some very good, intense strategies to help us manage our burgeoning photo collections. He's really serious about this as he should be because he does it for a living. Several of his ideas, I had already implemented on a limited basis on my own to make my photos easier to find when needed, but he takes us much further, explaining how to eliminate duplicates, ruthlessly delete all but your best or favorite photos, add meta tags, and he tells us what software, apps and sites he uses and explains step by step how to do it.

The first step is the hardest to me, it's getting ALL your photos together to start. I don't know if I'll get all five steps done, but I'd like to start and if it goes well, I'll know where to look back for the inspiration to complete the job.

I understand the idea of choosing just the best photos to save, especially with family photos, (think selfies)! I know how much just one good photo of my ancestors means to me. I want that.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read attempted Mario Kondo’s method many times over. It is wonderful until I get to trying to sort, organize, and preserve my photos. I basically have stopped photographing, after years of professional photography, in large part because my digital photo archive is an overwhelming disaster. I had initially learned from The DAM Book (Digital Asset Management). I didn’t not stand the test of time. Pratt catches me up on what I’ve been missing in my organizational methods and walks through the tasks of getting through my work and personal photos… bit by bit. At least I now know where to start with this overwhelming project. Wish me luck, and hopefully I’ll be able to update this review with a success story.

[Dr. Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Logical Approach to Organizing Digital Phots

This book does an excellent job of describing the workflow and related processes of cleaning up the thousands of digital photos people may have. However, some people may be a bit overwhelmed if they are not familiar with programs such as Lightroom Classic, so before delving in, it might be a good idea to look at a few YouTube videos on Lightroom Classic. That being said, the whole approach outlined in this easy-to-read book makes a great deal of sense. I’m looking forward to FINALLY getting my 70,000 digital photos people files purged and organized. This book will be my road map.

[Steve Bost · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great well-written how-to book that delivers the goods

Adam is passionate about preserving photographs and has honed his process over many years. His book is clearly written, not just detailing what to do - but just as importantly - why to do it and how to do it efficiently. He provides reviews and recommendations of applications and services. A resource I will go back to again and again.

[Tracy]

A systematic approach to gathering, organizing, and cleaning up your photo library. It has a lot of software specific information, chiefly on Lightroom; I'm guessing that info is approximately correct still but haven't gone through the process yet. I appreciate the guidance on curation, and could have gone in for a bit more handholding there since deciding what's best is the hardest part of the process for me. I think this is a helpful framing.

[Donna Donatacci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful resource for getting you photos under control

Provides valuable guidance for developing a system that allows one to organize photos so they can be enjoyed for generations to come

[Rose Sparrowking · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've got thousands of physical photos and tens of thousands of digital photos and this book is instrumental in me getting all those pictures organized. It's a year long project but I'm finally going to wrangle this mess, cut the junk out, and make it searchable and shareable.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are looking for a book with detailed instruction on scanning photos to archive then this is the book for you. However, not being tech savvy and searching for basic guidance on how to pare down and organize photographs, this book was not helpful for me.

[Synlee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brief Summary of Book:
This book provided practical tips of what works and what does not. I like that it shows you good recommendation of what to be done instead. For example, do not organize by people, events or subject which is what many people does. An example for what works is to sort by chronologically, add searchable metadata and rename files.

I also like that the author focus on starting with the mindset of decluttering. And also the book shows many step by step guide of what to do such as the following:

Curate Photos you wanna keep:
1. Telling stories: You want photos and sequences that tell stories.
2. Connecting with people: Photos that reveal relationships , show personal interactions & capture human reaction.
3. Capturing emotion: A photo of a child posing with a gift is fine, but I rather have the photo of them showing genuine surprise.
4. Preserving memories: Its okay to keep a photo even if it is not great but is still a great memory. A mediocre photo is better than no photo.
5. Not just smile: Sad photos are allowed not just happy. As long it portray a great stories to tell.
6. Good composition: There's a clear subject that is well positioned within the frame.
7. Good exposure: Avoid photographs that are too dark, too bright from hash flash, backlit against a window.
8. Multiple angles: Capture the same scene from multiple angles. Sometimes the best shot is from unexpected perspective.
9. Multiple orientation: Capturing a portrait and a landscape version of the same shot gives you more creative freedom.

However, the downside of this book was that some information might be obsolete as technology changes so fast such as CDs & DVDs. I don't know if anyone still using it now. Also, one thing I would caution about this book was that most of the recommendation (software tools) are chargeable, therefore take what you will from this book (tips & tricks) and leave the rest if you are not comfortable with the subscription services recommended.

Star Rating: 3.8 Stars

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thorough step-by-step approach to what could easily be an overwhelming project. I’ve procrastinated on getting my photo library in order for long enough. This book gave me the confidence in my decisions on how to approach this project.