How to Organize Your Phone Photos into Albums

Tap a method to see exactly how to organize your photos into albums.

iPhone: creating an album

In the Photos app's Albums tab, tap the "+" button to create a new album, then select and add the photos you want.

Android: creating an album

In Google Photos, go to Library, then choose to create a new album and group photos by whatever theme you like.

Using auto-categorization features

Most photo apps automatically sort photos by people, places, or objects, which saves a lot of the manual sorting work.

Cleaning up duplicate photos

Apps with a duplicate-detection feature can find near-identical or exact duplicate photos in bulk, making cleanup much faster.

Thousands of photos are much easier to search with albums

Splitting photos into themed albums -- travel, family, pets -- means you're not endlessly scrolling your entire camera roll later to find one specific photo.

If large photo files are slowing things down

If a lot of your photos are taking up significant storage, it's also worth looking into how to compress image file sizes to free up space.

Frequently Asked Questions

If I delete a photo from an album, does the original get deleted too?

In most photo apps, no -- an album is just a curated view of your photo library, so removing a photo from an album leaves the original untouched in your main library.

What if auto-categorization puts a photo in the wrong place?

Most apps let you manually recategorize or move a photo that was sorted incorrectly by the automatic feature.