Your Phone’s Camera Roll Is a Mess. Here’s How to Clean It Up.

Before you start organizing your photos, get them all in one place. If you have photos scattered across various apps, centralize them.

Use the photo-storage software that’s already on your phone. If you have an iPhone, that’s Apple Photos. For Android users, it’s Google Photos. Michael Hession, Wirecutter’s director of photography, told us that the tools in these free apps will be more than enough for most people to manage a photo collection. You can always switch to a different photo-storage service later on. Doing so will be much easier once you’ve put everything into one spot, so don’t worry about which software you choose to start.

Google Photos and Apple Photos both offer online access, but Apple Photos also works with the macOS desktop Photos app. Google Photos doesn’t have a desktop app, but its web version has most of the features found in the app. iPhone owners can install Google Photos if they prefer, but Apple doesn’t offer a photos app for Android. Both services let you edit photos, as well as back up and sync your photos between devices.

Apple gives you 5 GB of free iCloud space, and Google offers 15 GB of Google Drive space for free. If you exceed that limit, you’ll need to purchase more space. Additional iCloud storage starts at 99¢ per month for 50 GB, and Google charges $1.99 per month for 100 GB with Google One.

But some people, including PCMag digital organization columnist Jill Duffy, prefer a more hands-on approach to their photos, manually uploading them to Dropbox and organizing them into folders by date. If you don’t trust Google or Apple, or you simply want to use your own organizational system, platforms like Dropbox, Proton Drive, and others are great for storing your photos.

Look beyond your smartphone. You probably have photos hiding in more places than just your phone’s camera roll. Look around for old digital cameras, SD cards, hard drives, and flash drives that might have images on them. Take a look at your personal social media accounts, and make copies of the images you’ve posted, as well as photos others shared with you that you’d like to keep.

That will cover most digital photos, but many people have snapshots, slides, and film, too. In addition to scanning apps and flatbed scanners, there are also services that will digitize large collections of physical media. It’s no small task, and Duffy advised treating this as a separate project.

Now comes the fun part. There’s a good chance that your camera roll is full of stuff you’ve forgotten to delete, like screenshots and receipts. Clear out the clutter so that it’s easier to find your best pictures.

Start by deleting old screenshots and receipts. Type in “screenshot” in the search bar in Apple Photos or Google Photos to quickly pull up the screenshots in your collection. You may have to get creative, however. We found that searching for “receipts” didn’t turn up many of the receipts in our library. On Android, the Google Photos app helpfully identifies photos you may want to archive periodically, including screenshots and receipts. Apple Photos highlights duplicate images to help cut down on clutter.

Don’t worry so much about fuzzy duplicates. Both Duffy and professional photo organizer Casey von Stein said not to worry too much about fuzzy or low-quality images in your collections. “I believe what actually moves the needle more for wrangling your camera roll is favoriting the best items so you can filter for those easily and creating Albums of the items that matter most,” von Stein said.

Unless you have numerous low-quality images cluttering up your photo library, Duffy said it’s better to simply delete awful pictures immediately after you take them. Google Photos stacks duplicates or photos taken in rapid succession, so they don’t take up as much visual space and will automatically display what it thinks is the best. You can manually delete photos from these stacks. In the Photos app on iOS, Apple puts duplicate photos in a separate folder. In Photos, tap Albums in the bottom menu; then scroll down to Utilities and select Duplicates. You can combine those photos by tapping Merge next to the group of duplicates. (Duplicates are the same exact photos, not visually similar images shot in succession. You’ll have to go through and manually delete those.)

Google also offers cleanup tools in its Files app. In the Clean section, the app identifies duplicate and blurry photos that you can opt to delete, as well as large files that can be moved to the cloud to take up less space on your device. The Files app also suggests screenshots to Archive.

Move reminder pictures somewhere else. Photos can also serve as reminders or temporary references. I am often taking photos of books I want to read or information that would be too tedious to jot down, like a Wi-Fi password. Duffy and von Stein advise deleting these images and keeping the information in a note-taking app instead of your photos app.

Photos of deceased loved ones or ex-partners are emotional landmines, and intimate photos shouldn’t be stored in your main library.

In Apple Photos, you can store images out of sight in the Hidden folder. Just tap and hold on an image (or images), and select Hide from the menu that appears. Your Hidden folder is at the bottom of your Albums tab, and it requires authentication with Face ID or Touch ID before you can view the contents. Keep in mind that the contents of your Hidden folder are accessible online through iCloud, and once you’ve logged in, they don’t require additional authentication to view online.

Google Photos offers two options for hiding pictures: Archive and Locked folder. Photos in the Archive are removed from the main gallery but still appear in search results. Items in your Locked folder require additional authentication to view and don’t show up in search. Tap and hold on an image or images to move them to the Archive or Locked folder.

Unlike Apple Photos, Google Photos lets you opt out of backing up photos stored in the Locked folder. This means they’ll be accessible only from your phone, but it also means they could be lost forever if your phone is lost or damaged.

Even after you’ve cleaned out the junk and hidden some photos you don’t want to see anymore, it can be hard to find specific images in your library. Search is a powerful tool for finding what you’re looking for, but sometimes it needs some help.

Consider organizing photos by faces. Apple Photos and Google Photos both offer robust search functions to help you find specific people (even as they go from being children to adults) and some animals. Both apps suggest faces of people who appear in your photos, and you can assign names to these to make them easier to find. However, not everyone is comfortable with having their photos analyzed like this. If that’s you, leave this feature off.

In Google Photos, tap Search and then View All in the People & Pets section. From there you see all of the faces Google Photos has detected. Tap any picture to assign a name. In Apple Photos, open the People & Pets album in the Albums tab. Tapping any of the portraits shows all of the photos of that individual and allows you to assign them a name.

Search for date, location, or items in photographs. Search can pinpoint images based on the text in the photo (with varying degrees of accuracy) as well as metadata, such as the location or date the photo was taken. Search can often pick up objects like tables or cars and even landmarks. Narrow down your options by searching for what you know about a picture: the date, location, and things you know were in frame.

Set captions. Swipe up on a photo in Apple Photos and Google Photos to add custom captions that highlight features search might miss. For example: If your friend’s face was obscured in several pictures of them dancing at a wedding, those shots won’t turn up in search. When you add names and descriptions to captions, those terms become searchable.

Some groups of photos don’t fit nicely into searchable categories. Snapshots from a globe-trotting vacation can span several days or weeks and numerous locations. By sorting these pictures into an album, you bring together those disparate images, and this can become a collaborative effort where invitees add their own images.

Let the apps build folders for you. When you create a new album in Google Photos, you have the option to select people or pets for an auto-updating album that shows all the photos of whomever you choose. Tap the plus sign at the top of the screen, select Album, and then select People & Pets on the following screen. Then tap the people (or pets) that Google Photos has identified in your library.

In Apple Photos, when you create a new album, you can use search to quickly find photos you want to add. In the Albums tab, tap the plus sign in the top left of the screen, and then tap New Album and give the album a name. On the next screen, you can search for specific people or use more-general terms, such as “cars,” and view the results. You have to select images to add to the album individually, however.

Favoriting photos can take different forms—in Apple Photos, you add a heart, and in Google Photos, it’s a star. Yet the effect is the same: earmarking specific pictures for easy access later on. In both apps, you just long-press on an image and select Favorites; the image will now appear in an album called Favorites.

Favorite and unfavorite often. Is there a picture you search for frequently and have had trouble finding? Favorite it. Do you have a particularly good selfie that you like to use as a profile pic on social media or dating apps? Favorite it, and then unfavorite it when you take a better one. Did you take a picture of where you parked your car, to help you remember it? Favorite it, and then delete the picture when you’re done.

Plan a delete day. Von Stein recommends making a habit of searching the day’s date and then deleting, archiving, and sorting photos from that day in years past. Many photo apps now include features that highlight those photos for you, and this is good inspiration for deleting the ones you don’t want to keep.

Check your app’s choices. Modern photo-storage software does much of the decluttering for you, but you might not always agree with its choices. For example, Google Photos stacks similar photos and burst images, so they take up less visual space in the gallery. To make sure the app is highlighting what’s really the best, tap on a picture to see the other options.

Cleaning up your photos can be a big task, but it’s not an insurmountable one. By going slowly and using all of the tools you already have at your disposal, you can turn a digital photo dump into a well-organized collection.

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.