How To Keep Your Photos Organized While Traveling Part II

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A few months ago I posted about how I keep my photos organized while traveling with multiple cameras and phones and no internet. In that post I discussed the actual process of combining and backing up photos while on the road - the how to get your photos backed up and safe. In this post I discuss what to actually do with those photos so that by the time you get home you are ready to share them with friends, make a slideshow, or make a photo book. I use Mylio Photos, but for the most part the tips below can be applied to any photo organizing software like Apple Photos, Google Photos, SmugMug, FOREVER, and more.

Set up the general organization of your travel photos before or at the beginning of your trip.

How are your travel photos organized now? Or are they? Travel is a passion of mine and I’m a professional photo organizer, so my travel photos may have more organization than the average person. Each trip is in it’s own folder in my photo organizing software AND I have digital albums of all of my trips. You may be thinking, why? or Huh?

Let me explain.

In any good photo organizing software you can see your photos chronologically so you can find vacations fairly easily if you know when in time to look, but they are generally not in a folder structure you can access outside of the program - something that has always bothered my control-freak tendencies. I use Mylio to organize and store my personal photos because in Mylio, unlike most photo storage solutions, photos are kept in folders; folders you can see in Finder on your Mac or in Explorer on your PC. But accessing the photos via those Finder or Explorer folders is not enjoyable as you are essentially just looking at lists of file names with little searching capability. Mylio adds the database functionality that you get from Apple Photos, Google Photos, FOREVER, Amazon, SmugMug and others on top of the folders so you can see, search, and enjoy your photos from multiple views (if you are interested in trying out Mylio for 30 days free, click this link).

This is all well and good, but sometimes I want to see all my travel photos from different times and destinations together. Enter the album. In addition to housing all of my travel photos in their own folders, they also each have their own album, allowing me to scroll through and see my trips together. Just about all photo storage software allows you to organize your photos in albums - Apple Photos, Google Photos, FOREVER, Amazon and SmugMug all allow you to do this. Albums in this sense are simply virtual copies which you can organize multiple different ways. The same photo can be in multiple albums without taking up any additional space or creating duplicates, but albums allow you to collect your photos in as many different ways as you like. I talk more about the power of organizing with albums in this post.

So before I set out on a trip, I know that I will need a folder for the travel photos and an album, and I set these up before I leave (or more realistically, on the plane…) The folder will hold all of the photos from the trip, the album usually my favorites and others that help tell the story.

Before you leave, or while you are on the plane or in the car, no matter what software you are using create a folder or album with the name of your trip. I always name by date first then destination as most software will sort albums alphabetically, but you might prefer to name the album by destination. For me, generally one folder or album for the entire trip is enough. Another option is to break the trip down by individual destinations within the trip. If you set these up ahead of time you are removing some of the extra work while traveling meaning that you’ll be more likely to spend the few minutes sorting through photos at the end of each day.

Make a daily review of your travel photos a habit.

Each night, or over breakfast, or during siesta review the prior days’s photos and add them into the folders or albums you created. If you do nothing else, you are at least getting these all into one place making them very easy to find later.

But if you can spare a few extra minutes, you should:

delete the obvious duds
favorite the obvious favorites

These two steps will greatly enhance your organization and any work you may need to do later before sharing or making a book. I guarantee you can delete a bunch of photos at this step. When you took that family photo or a photo of a famous landmark, how many did you take? Do you need them all? How about when you handed your phone over to someone else to take a group photo of you and they took 15? This is a great time to just pick one or two and delete the rest. If you do a day at a time it shouldn’t take very long - unless you are on safari and have a thousand photos of animals…

contact sheet of photos with many greyed out and others starred as favorites — I have a lot of trouble deleting animal photos - I find it harder than reviewing people photos.

Want to send a few to family and friends back home while you are still out and about? You have already identified your favorites so you when you are ready you won’t need to wade through them all, just look at your favorites and sharing will be quick.

Add captions and keywords for greater searchability.

If you have just a few more minutes, add the where, why or anything interesting about the photos. I keep location tagging on when I travel (see this post) so it is automatically added, but I also tend to add the location as a caption or keyword as I like to see the name when I pull up the photo without always having to go to map view. Or if there is something else that is interesting I’ll add it to the caption.

Biking down from the top of the railway in Flam, Norway.

In this example, you can see that the location was added automatically at the top because I had my location turned on for my phone. Although we were, unfortunately, quite far from that hotel… In the caption I added the words my youngest son yelled to me as he entered the tunnel. Why? Because about a second after I stopped recording this video he crashed and burned in the tunnel resulting in a broken arm. He tends to break a lot of bones so I actually have a keyword “broken” and another for “medical” for easy searching later 🙄.

Many photo storage solutions have excellent built-in AI. But while that might help me find a photo by searching “bike,” I can find this photo much faster with the keywords and caption that I added. And it memorializes those fateful words.

As a side note, I keep a journal for every trip. When my boys were little I used to write down what they said about the day, or record them with my phone. I then used their descriptions in our photo books. I still keep the journal but it’s different now that they are adult-like. Often I’ll add the stories right to the photos while doing the daily review.

Pro tip: speed up captions using voice to text.

Have a longer story you want to add to the photo but don’t want to do all that typing on your phone? Use the voice to text feature! I have a whole post on how this works here, but in short, you can generally use the voice to text feature on any app where you can type with the keyboard. Look for the little microphone in the space you would normally be typing. This includes adding captions to photos. I find that it is eerily accurate, and where it is not it is at least funny. This feature works on both iPhone and Android.

When you get home, share and enjoy!

If you follow just some of these tips by the time you get home your travel photos will be well on the way to organized. Returning home from vacation is always a busy time with too much going on, so you may not get back to these photos for a while. If you’ve deleted, favorited, and added information when it was still fresh it doesn’t matter how long it takes for you to get back to these and do something - you will already have preserved the most important memories.