A two-rule photo archive, four years later

Most photo advice starts with software. Mine started with a dead laptop.

I had about nine years of pictures on a machine that stopped booting on a Tuesday, and the only copy that mattered was the one I had been meaning to make. Since then the rule has been simple: everything lives in two places before the week ends, and the folder names are boring enough that I never have to think about them.

Rule one: one folder per year, one subfolder per month. No themed folders, no best-of collections. The moment I start curating while filing, the filing stops happening. Month folders are also the only structure that survives a restore without a spreadsheet.

Rule two: names are for searching, not for sorting. A file called 2026-03-14-kitchen-table.jpg is findable in a decade. IMG_4821.jpg is a mystery. I rename on import and never look back.

Everything else is optional. Duplicate detection, ratings, faces — all nice, and all things I have started and abandoned at least twice. The two rules have survived four years precisely because they take ten minutes a month and require no decisions.

The part I underrated was the resizing step. Phone cameras now produce files big enough that a year of pictures is annoying to move around, so I keep a stripped-down copy of each month at a reasonable size and treat the originals as an archive I rarely open. I wrote up the exact settings I use, along with the folder layout, over at LapPhotos — and a short version of the import checklist that I keep pinned.

The other habit that stuck came from the opposite direction: using AI tools for the tedious parts instead of the creative ones. Batch renaming, generating alt text, drafting captions — all things I write about at AI Image Prompt when a workflow turns out to be worth keeping rather than just clever.

Four years in, the archive is not beautiful. It is complete, which is the only thing I actually needed.