01
There is a middle way.
Everybody has tens of thousands of photos and a low hum of guilt about them. Some of us have tried to dive in headlong and organize them, only to find ourselves deflated and no better off than we were before.
There's no way around the fact that you need to be involved in the organizational process, but so far we've been given two extremes. Let the machine categorize it and search by a description, or fight with albums and plod through your photos one by one.
There is a middle way, however. We can use all the power of the machine and combine it with tools that can make the work manageable, not soul-crushing, not mindless. It's not the push of a button and it's not digging a trench with a spoon. It's like a quilt, or a carpentry project. It costs your attention, but not your sanity.
02
There's no wrong way here.
An overlooked aspect of photo organization is the subtle anxiety it can cause. This is especially true of albums. As you put pictures in albums you find yourself stuck, because a single word or phrase is a limitation that your photos resist.
As you apply labels and tags, it is helpful to remember that you're simply giving yourself a way back into your photos. You don't need to get hung up on the perfect organizational system. Your library is a living thing and how you reference it may change over the years, and all the tools that got you organized in Photo Flashlight work just as well on refining your organization.
03
The part that isn't tagging.
You almost never have one photo of something. You have nine. Naming them one at a time is the reason people give up on this, and it's what every other app asks of you.
Photo Flashlight doesn't ask you to work through your library one by one; it invites you to have a pulse on it. When working with photos you will typically work on them in batches. Our concept of the stack is the same as having a stack of pictures you just brought home back when you needed to develop your film. Piles within the stack are the equivalent of sorting them into categories. We make the physical process of this painless.
It also recognizes that you can do this in several passes. You may group everything by a broad event like a birthday or a vacation. Then, when you have time, search for that term and start refining it from there. The key is that you are creating your footholds, the ones that will always allow you to get to where you want to go.
04
Everything is where your thumb already is.
Another overlooked drag on photo organization is how far you have to go to reach a tool at the moment you want it. It should already be waiting where you're working. Photo Flashlight avoids deeply nesting tools that pull you further from your photos. The controls live along the bottom edge, inside the arc your thumb makes, which allows you to make progress without shifting your grip and, most importantly, without reaching across the screen.
This sounds small until you realize it isn't. Repeatedly reaching across the screen interrupts your connection with the memories you're thinking about categorizing. That small interruption happening repeatedly across thousands of pictures will kill your motivation faster than you thought possible. Photo Flashlight does its absolute best to stay out of your way.
05
What you've handled leaves the screen.
Photos you haven't decided on wait in the Inbox. The moment one is named or trashed it's gone from that view, so you are never scrolling past your own finished work to find the part you haven't done yet. The screen only ever shows what's left.
Which means the count in the corner only goes down. There's a small daily number if you want the nudge, and it doesn't move once it's set. Clear a stack, then another, and a library of forty thousand starts to feel like something with an end to it.
