What to do with 3,000 photos after a holiday

You come back from two weeks away with somewhere north of three thousand photos. You scroll them once on the flight home, feel vaguely pleased, and never open them again. The trip was real; the record of it is functionally lost.

Getting from one to the other takes about an hour, once.

Do it within a week

While you can still remember which village was which. Leave it three months and you will be looking at photographs of places you cannot name, which makes editing them much harder and much less enjoyable.

Pass one: delete the obvious

Go through quickly and remove only what is unambiguously dead — blurred frames, accidental shots, the four identical photos of a menu. Do not make quality judgements yet. This pass is mechanical and it will remove perhaps a third of the roll.

Pass two: one photo per moment

Now go through again and, for each thing that happened, keep the single best frame. You took eleven of that sunset. One of them is better than the others; keep it and let the rest go.

This is the pass that does the real work, and it is uncomfortable — but eleven versions of a sunset is not eleven memories, it is one.

Pass three: the shortlist

From what is left, mark the thirty or forty you would show someone. These are the ones that go into a book, onto a wall, or to the people you travelled with.

Three thousand photographs is not a record of a trip. Forty is.

Then collect everyone else's

If you travelled with other people, your roll is missing the photographs of you. Get everyone's into one place before their phones fill up and the pictures start getting deleted for space — which is the quiet way most group trip photos actually disappear.

Then make it physical

A shortlist that stays on a phone is only marginally better than the full three thousand. Print a handful, or lay the trip out as a book in the order it happened. Photographs that exist as objects get looked at; photographs in an app get scrolled past.

Fondays collects everyone's photos from the trip into one pool at full resolution, and makes prints and photobooks from them. See what it costs.