How to Organize Your Photos for an Annual Review Book

Creating a year-in-review photo book is a wonderfully rewarding project. Whether you’re working on your first book or the latest volume in a growing collection, the process always feels meaningful. It’s a chance to reflect on the past year’s events big and small, everyday happenings, and precious relationships with family and friends. Plus, it involves the enjoyable tasks of choosing photos, themes, layouts, and other design elements, all resulting in a beautiful book you can hold in your hands and treasure forever.

If you’re ready to get started on a year-in-review photo book, it all starts with a review of the past year’s photos. This first step is key to the whole project, and depending on your photo organization system (or lack thereof), it could either feel like a breeze or a bit of a stumbling block. Wherever you land on that organization spectrum, there are some smart and easy ways to get an entire year’s worth of photos ready for consideration.

As a bonus, these tips will help you keep all the current year’s new photos organized, too. This time next year, your new year-in-review book project will be even more satisfying.

Related: 5 Easy Steps to Making Your Year-in-Review Photo Book

Gather and centralize all images

Reviewing all the photos from a calendar year and choosing favorites for a year-in-review photo book is so much easier when all your digital images are in the same spot. This “spot” is one master folder that you can title with the year or a similar name. Create the folder in any one of the following places:

• Smartphone or tablet
• Laptop or desktop computer
• An app or software designed for photo storage (more on that below)
• External hard drive or flash drive
• Cloud storage e.g. Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, or Dropbox

The first task in organizing photos for a year-in-review book is to simply drag all the photo files from the past year into this master folder. Don’t get distracted by the photos, or start sorting, deleting, or admiring them at this stage! Those steps will come later.

The majority of your photos might already be in one of these storage spaces. Quickly identify the photos from a select year by sorting or searching by date. Move those images to the master file. Think about all the other places you might find photos that need to be centralized in the master file, such as:

• Social media feeds (your own and those of family and friends)
• Email attachments
• SD cards from digital cameras
• Flash drives
• Devices and cloud storage accounts other than your primary ones
• Printed photographs e.g. school photos (digitize them first)

Once you’re confident you have all your photos from the year in a single master folder, this step is complete. To double-check that the photos are all from the correct year, sort the images in the folder by date and look for any outliers.

Use photo management software and apps

While it’s not essential to use photo management software or apps to organize your photos, these tools offer many useful functions and can speed up the process considerably.

Popular photo management apps include Apple Photos for iPhone, which also syncs with the Photos app on macOS desktop; and Google Photos for Android devices, which also has a web version. These apps can be used for editing photos as well as storage.

Tip: You can upload images directly from Google Photos to Mixbook.

There are many choices for photo management software that you can install on a laptop or desktop computer, including both free and paid options. Some are designed for pros and offer a vast wealth of functions, but free and low-cost options are usually sufficient for most Mixbookers. Examples include Adobe Bridge (free) and Adobe Lightroom (paid).

Apps and software automate the process of organizing photos, making it easier to view, edit, and sort the files. Other functions to look for include:

• Auto-renaming of files
• Deleting duplicates
• Tagging photos with keywords or captions
• I.D.’ing faces
• Matching similar photos by content
• Favoriting or star-rating photos

Sort photos into albums

You might be ready to create your year-in-review photo book as soon as your master folder is complete. However, it is generally more helpful to create subfolders, especially if you have a large volume of files. Creating a folder for each month is the most logical approach. Adding some keywords to the name of the folder e.g. “JUNE-anniversary-camping-aquarium,” makes it easier to find photos at a glance.

If you’re using a photo book theme with a monthly or seasonal format, such as the Colorful Monthly Scrapbook theme or Seasonal Year in Review theme, matching subfolders will make photo selection a cinch.

Some groupings of photos that you want to organize for your year-in-review book will span multiple months. Create custom subfolders that make sense to you e.g. “grandkids,” “garden projects,” or “karate classes.” These custom subfolders are helpful if you’re working on a niche book, such as a My Kid’s Year in Review book, or a year-in-review book dedicated to your dog or cat.

Related: How to Store and Organize Photos for Your Photo Book

Delete, delete, delete!

Once you have a basic organization of subfolders within a master folder for the year, clean it up by deleting unwanted photos. This step isn’t essential, but it’s usually worth it to get rid of duplicates and very similar photos, random screenshots, accidental and blurry images, e.t.c. Some software and apps can do this automatically.

Tip: Resist the temptation to delete photos just because they’re “unflattering” or a bit awkward. Photos that make you cringe right now may well make you smile or laugh in the future.

Create backups

It’s not a direct part of the photo book project, but it’s smart to create backups of your photo files as part of the organization stage. It’s best to have two separate storage locations for the master file for the year (and other years). For example, pair device storage with an external hard drive, flash drive, or cloud storage.

Now the fun part: Make your year-in-review photo book!

The purpose of organizing your digital images isn’t to have tidy-looking files; it’s to make it easier to find and enjoy your photos whenever you want to, without any obstacles. With organized files, it’s no effort at all to upload your favorite photos to Mixbook or the Mixbook Mobile App and get started on a custom year-in-review book.