What We're Doing Over the Next Six Weeks
Okay so I want to actually map this out for you, because I know some of you signed up not totally sure what you were getting into. That's fine. Here's the plan.
Six weeks. We meet once a week, you bring your phone charged (actually charged, not "I'll be fine"), and each week builds on the last one. I'm not going to make you memorize anything. You're going to do it, on your actual phone, in the room, with me standing there while you do it.
Week one and two, you already did
We talked about why backup comes before organizing, we figured out whether you're iPhone or Android (and yes I know some of you are still not sure, that's what week two was for), and we read that storage full message together so you understand it's not your phone dying, it's just full. Those were the foundation weeks. Boring on purpose.
Week three: turning on auto-backup
This is the big one. This is the whole point of the class, if I'm honest. We're going to go into your phone's settings together, find the backup toggle, and turn it on. For iPhone that's iCloud Photos. For Android it's Google Photos backup. I'll walk both rooms through it, and I'm going to lean on you Android folks to help each other, because I'm an iPhone person and I'll say that plainly when we get there.
Once that toggle is on, your phone starts uploading photos in the background. You don't have to do anything else. That's the safety net. That's the thing that means if your phone falls in the toilet or gets run over in the church parking lot, your pictures aren't gone.
Week four: what NOT to back up
Sooo, this is the week where we deal with the fact that your phone thinks a screenshot of a receipt and a photo of your kid's birthday are the same kind of file. They're not. We're going to separate those out, because I feel pretty strongly that screenshots do not belong living with your actual photos. If you don't deal with this, your whole system gets clogged and you can't find anything. This is a small hill I will die on.
Week five: organizing, sort of
This is where I have to be honest with you up front. I am not a naturally organized person about this. I got 2019 sorted into monthly folders one night, was cruising along, felt great about myself, and then got to August and just... stopped. Lost steam. Left it. Didn't touch it again for two weeks. That's genuinely how my energy works and I'm not going to pretend otherwise in front of you.
So week five isn't "achieve a perfect system." It's "learn one simple folder or album method, start it, and give yourself permission to leave it half done if that's where you land that day." We'll do dates, we'll do a couple named albums (kids, ward stuff, whatever you actually need), and that's it. Don't build something elaborate. Elaborate is how people quit in week one of doing it themselves.
Week six: deleting, and maybe printing
Last week we tackle the thing everybody feels guilty about, which is deleting photos. I'm going to make the case that you do not need to keep every single one. I found a folder of about 400 nearly identical sunset pictures off the point of the mountain on my own phone. I deleted 396 of them. Kept four. I stand by that number completely and I'll show you the four if you want proof I'm not a monster about it.
We'll also talk about printing the ones that actually matter. My mother-in-law wanted physical prints of her temple photos and I couldn't even find them for her, they were buried under two years of screenshots, which honestly is part of why I take this whole thing so seriously now. A print on the wall doesn't care if your phone dies. It doesn't need a password. There's something to that.
A few practical things up front
Bring your phone charged, and bring your charger too if you've got one, some of these settings menus and uploads can eat battery while we're working. If you're on your home wifi at home for this, great, that upload happens faster and doesn't touch your phone data. If you're not sure how much storage you're actually using on your cloud account, don't worry about that yet, we'll get there in week three.
And if your camera roll is a disaster right now, good. Bring that disaster. That's exactly who this class is for. I use my own real camera roll, mess and all, every single week, because I think showing people the mess makes them feel less alone about their own.
Before next time: just make sure you know your passcode and your Apple ID or Google account login cold, because we'll need to get into settings quick in week three and I don't want us burning half the class on password resets.