How to organise
family photos.

Start by finding everything. The Library of Congress’s first step is to identify all your digital photos, on cameras, computers and memory cards, including the ones you have put online. List every place before you move a file:

Then copy everything into one working folder on a computer or an external drive. Copy rather than move, so nothing is lost if a transfer fails. On an iPhone, select the photos in the Photos app, tap the Share button, then Export Unmodified Original to save the unedited originals straight to a connected drive. For Google Photos, Google’s Takeout page creates an archive you can download.

Prints, slides and family papers are a bigger job. Our guide to creating a family archive covers them.

The Library of Congress’s second step is to decide which photos matter most, and it says that can be a few or many. Most phones hold bursts of near-identical shots, screenshots and photos of parking spaces, and none of those need a name.

Where you have several versions of the same photo, keep the best one. The Library’s advice is to save the version with the highest quality, which is usually the largest file with the biggest pixel dimensions. You can see both in the photo’s information panel.

A quick way through is three folders: Keep, Maybe and Delete. Move fast on the first pass and come back to Maybe later. If you are unsure about a photo, ask whether anyone in the family would miss it.

Start every file name with the date, written year, month, day. The Library of Congress suggests this yyyymmdd structure in its guide to scanning personal collections, with examples such as 20100914-Rehearsal-001.jpg and 20100915-Ceremony-001.jpg. Because the year comes first and every date has the same eight digits, files named this way line up in time order on any phone, Mac or Windows PC.

After the date, add a word or two about the event and a number: 19870614-Spain-holiday-001.jpg. If you only know the year, fill the month and day with zeros (19870000-Spain-holiday-001.jpg) so the file still sorts at the start of that year. The Library’s advice is to create your own system but be consistent.

Stick to letters, numbers and hyphens. Windows does not allow nine characters in file names at all (< > : " / \ | ? and *), so a name that works on one computer can fail when a relative copies it to theirs.

Go by year, then event, and leave people to tags. The New York State Archives suggests one main Photos folder, with the images from each event in a subfolder named with the event and its date. The Library of Congress’s example works the same way, a folder within a folder: Family, then a folder for the wedding, then the dated files inside it.

Folders by person sound tidy but quickly fall apart. A photo of Nan with three grandchildren would need four copies, one in each person’s folder. A photo can only live in one folder, but it can carry as many names as you like.

Add one more file at the top: a short note that explains the system, who looks after it and where the copies are. The Library of Congress recommends writing a brief description of your folder structure, and putting a copy of your photo inventory with your important papers.

The Library of Congress counts tagging as part of organising: add the names of the people in each photo, plus descriptive subjects such as a place or an occasion.

Phone apps can do much of the work. In Apple’s Photos app, when you name a person in one photo, they are added to the People & Pets collection and named in your other photos automatically. Google Photos groups similar faces so you can add a name to each group, in the regions and accounts where the feature is available.

There is a catch. Google says face labels are private to each account and are not shared when you share photos. Treat face recognition as a shortcut, and write the names where the whole family can see them: in a caption, in the note in each event folder, or alongside the print. Our guide to labelling old photos covers prints.

A good caption does three jobs: it says who is in the photo, why it matters and when it was taken. The photo below, from the family of Ancestorii’s founder, carries the caption he gave it.

Clear out duplicates before you rename anything, or you will name the same photo twice. Gathering from several phones always produces copies: the same picture backed up twice, or sent between relatives.

On an iPhone, the Photos app collects them under Collections, Utilities, Duplicates, where Merge combines each set. On a computer, sort each folder by date and look for files of the same size side by side. When two copies differ, keep the larger one.

Ancestorii’s family Library is built for the sorted, chosen part of a collection. It is one private library shared by everyone you invite to your family space. Folders have a name, a description and a date, such as “Holiday 2026”. You can upload many photos and videos at once, and iPhone HEIC photos are converted to JPEG automatically. Photos uploaded straight into the Memory Book, canvas or acrylic editors are saved to the Library too, in an automatic Uncategorised folder.

From the Library, photos go into family photo albums, where each picture can have a name, a date in plain words such as “Summer 1994”, a thread called The Story where relatives add what they remember, and voice notes.

Storage is one pool for the whole family: 1 GB on the Free plan, which needs no card, and 100 GB on Premium at £3.99 a month per family. Keep your full set of originals in your own backups too, since converted HEIC photos are JPEG copies, not the original files. Our guide to backing up family photos explains how.