1. Create and label folders on your hard drives or cloud storage. Label them by date-location-event (for example, April 15-Maui-Vacation) and move your photos into the appropriate folder.

2. Organize and backup your photos on a regular schedule. For example, every first Monday of the month. They’ll be ready so that spring cleaning your photos will be easy and not so daunting.

3. Delete blurred photos or ones taken with an incorrect exposure and only keep one duplicate unless the second is really funny or very original.

4. Choose the very best of your photos to print and store them in a subfolder labeled “printing” in the main folder you created for the event. Print your selected photos so you can have a reminder of Spring Break in Whistler on your wall and have it in a folder on your hard drive.

5. Repeat! Downsizing photos take a once-over, then another, and sometimes you have to do it again. Back in the day, it was expensive to get photos printed, so everyone kept every picture they ever printed. But if you wouldn't bother printing it now, then why keep it? Give yourself permission to let go of the images you no longer love.

Treat your images like sentimental items; search for the treasures and let go of the rest.  Instead of overwhelming people with 28 gigantic albums from the bins in your basement, full of odd pictures and the stellar shots buried here and there, you can appreciate flipping through several albums that you carefully curated and share stories about your collection of stand-out photos. Your family and friends will thank you!