Did you know your camera roll is actually a searchable photo database?

A long long time ago we used to take photos on actual film. Film that came in a roll. It was linear. You took 24 or 36 photos at a time, dropped them off to be developed, and picked them up a week later. You received one print of each negative, sometimes two if you asked for doubles (not called duplicates back then), then decided where and what to do with each one. But each photo could only be stored in one place or given to one person.

No more.

Now we take photos with our phones and those photos are instantly available, we keep a copy, we send a copy or two or three. etc. We are no longer stuck using our photos in a linear fashion.

So why do we refer to our photo library as our “camera roll”?

Stop thinking of the photos on your phone as a roll. Stop thinking of them in linear fashion. Think of them as a database. A database can be organized in multiple ways. A database can be searched. This is what you can now do with your photos. But to do that, you need to take advantage of the caption, keyword, and search capabilities of your phone.

First, all iPhones and Android phones have innate searching capability. Go ahead, try it. Here is what I see when I search for “cake” or “horse”. I chose these words because I know I have not added either of those words as keywords.

Not bad, right? A donut is not cake, but it’s pretty close.

The built-in search is pretty good, but you can make your library so much better with a few keywords. Concrete example: last week, after many bike mishaps, we finally bought my son a new bike. The bike comes with free maintenance for a year and some other things, but you need to keep the receipt to take advantage. What teenage boy will keep a receipt? Certainly not mine. So he took a picture of it, swiped up, wrote “bike receipt” in the caption, and now he can find it via search whenever he needs it. Proud mom moment.

I do that with all sorts of things. Earlier this week it was National Sons Day. So I searched my SmugMug library for my sons’ names, and up came all the photos that I have of both of my boys together. So useful!

I have a LOT of photos of my teen boys. But sometimes I prefer to remember them at this age. Parents of teens will understand…

Some other useful categories: recipes, receipts, holidays, special events, inspirational memes, books you want to read. Whatever is important to you. You can also make virtual albums for these categories.

This is how to unleash the full power of the photo database on your phone.

It may seem overwhelming if you have a lot of photos, and even if you don’t. Don’t try to go backwards and keyword everything all at once. Start with the photos you take today, the photos you might like to find later. Make it a habit. Then as you have time (use the 15 minutes in the parking lot waiting to pick up a child, or meet someone for coffee) do a bit more. Eventually make it a habit. Any time you find yourself going into your photos to look for something, add a keyword or caption to those photos so that next time you want them you can find them in an instant.

As always, reach out to me if you have questions!