1160 – Declutter Your Phone: Tom talks Photo Management Part 3

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Intro: Tom Antion continues his photo-management series with practical ways to clean up an overloaded iPhone photo library, reclaim storage space, and protect your photos with backups. The goal is to gradually turn thousands of accumulated pictures into a library containing mostly photos you actually want to keep.
📸 DECLUTTER YOUR PHOTOS
• Clean up a little at a time rather than tackling thousands of photos at once.
• Search by month to review photos from that month across multiple years.
• Delete blurry, accidental, duplicate, obsolete, and unnecessary pictures.
• Mark your best photos as Favorites so they're easier to find later.
🗑️ DELETING & RECOVERING
• Deleted photos remain in Recently Deleted for up to 30 days.
• Find them under Photos → Collections → Utilities → Recently Deleted.
• With iCloud Photos syncing, deleting from your main library generally deletes the photo across your synchronized devices.
• Removing a photo from an album is different—you can remove it from the album without deleting the original.
👯 REMOVE DUPLICATES
• Go to Photos → Collections → Utilities and use the duplicate feature.
• iPhone can merge duplicates while retaining the better-quality version.
• Duplicates can be handled individually or in groups.
💾 FREE UP STORAGE
• Check Settings → General → iPhone Storage.
• If you're running low, attack videos first because they can consume dramatically more space than photos.
• Permanently remove unwanted large videos from Recently Deleted if you're certain you don't need them.
☁️ ICLOUD & BACKUPS
• Enable iCloud photo synchronization to keep photos synchronized across Apple devices.
• Optimize iPhone Storage can keep smaller versions locally while retaining the higher-quality originals in iCloud.
• Photos can also be backed up to USB-C thumb drives, SSDs, or traditional external hard drives.
🖨️ BONUS TIP
You can print directly from an iPhone to a compatible wireless printer using Share → Print.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY
Don't wait for your photo library to become unmanageable. Spend a few minutes periodically deleting junk, merging duplicates, removing large unnecessary videos, and favoriting the photos that matter. Combine that with iCloud optimization and a backup strategy, and you'll have more available storage and a much easier photo library to navigate.

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Episode 1160 – Photo Management Part 3
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1160 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to do part three of our photo management course. And we're calling this declutter your Phone and, and mostly iPhone stuff here, but you Android users, you take the idea and I don't know how to do it on Android, but they'll do just about all the same stuff. So. So just take the idea and then go to YouTube or something and figure out how to do it on an Android. And if you missed part one and part two there. Part one was 1150 and part two was 1155. So when you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com/episode number. That was 1150 for part one, 1155 for part two, and this is 1160 for part three. And I hope you didn't miss episode 1159. That was all about TikTok shop and what it means and what it can do for your business, not as your only business. All right, that's a warning, but it can add revenue to your business. And of course, our automation book is now out. The latest one is version 4.0. It's going to blow your mind when you see all the things you could do. And you don't have to read the whole thing because it's like 260 pages, but the chapters each, almost all the chapters have a practical session at the end where it just tells you the software to use, what to do with it, and so forth. screwthecommute.com/automatefree So you don't have to read the whole thing if you don't want to. But a lot of good stuff in the chapters too and check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV.
[00:02:11] Okay, so first of all, I want to give you kind of a mindset method that I learned and I'm starting to implement, but you know, I've got, you know, like most of us, thousands and thousands of photos that I didn't do this stuff on. So what we want to eventually have happen is that your library is just full of the pictures that you absolutely love and get rid of the junk and the clutter and the blurry ones and the, the accidental ones and the duplicates and everything like that. So that's our goal here. And one way you can do it is you can go to your photo app and which we covered on previous versions of this and search for a month. Let's say you search for August. So it's going to bring up all the photos that you've taken in the month of August, but not just this August. If you don't put the year, it's going to bring up every August until you first started doing this. And then you go through and look, oh, there's a picture that's worthless. I'm going to delete it. There's one of my favorites of all time. You're going to click the start button and favorite it, and you're going to get rid of screen captures of receipts from 1910.
[00:03:34] You know, just just cluttering up your phone, say, and a little bit every day. Or if you're, you know, waiting in line somewhere or at the doctor's office or, you know, wherever, just take a little bit and over time you'll really clean up your library. And most of the stuff in there will be stuff you really, really love and it'll take away space from your, you know, give you more space in your, your, uh, your phone. Okay, so here's some other methods that you probably want to use. You want to go into your. Oh, and by the way, no, this is before I give you the other methods, I just want to remind you and tell you how to get to it. If you accidentally delete a photo and you say, oh man, I wish I hadn't deleted that. The phone covers you for up to 30 days in the recently deleted section, and you just go to the photos app, go to collections, go to utilities, and then click on Recently Deleted. And then you can restore ones that you accidentally deleted for up to 30 days. All right. Or if you absolutely do not want it wasting space on your phone and you know you're not going to restore it, you can delete it permanently right there. All right. So so that's your recently deleted.
[00:05:00] Now keep this phrase in mind. This is where I learned delete means delete. So if you delete something from your library. It's. And you have your sink turned on and your iCloud, it's deleting it everywhere from all your devices and everywhere. So just keep that in mind. But one exception to that is albums. See, when albums, if you go to delete a picture from your album, it's. It gives you an option to delete it just from the album or delete it permanently from everywhere. So that's the one exception to the delete means delete rule. All right. Now, another one of the other methods that you can use is go to the same place, photos, collections, and then utilities. And then there's a section called Remove duplicates. And if you click on that, if nothing comes up, that means you don't have duplicates. Don't worry about it. But if a bunch of them come up, it's going to give you an option to merge those duplicates. And what it does. It removes the lowest quality one and keeps the highest quality one. So you always keep the you want to keep the highest quality and that gets rid of duplicates. And you can do them all at once if you want. But if you need to pick and choose, you can pick them one at a time. So that's, that can give you a lot of space. Now you can delete multiple stuff pretty easily rather than doing them one at a time.
[00:06:41] And the way you do that is let's say you search, I don't know for the your ex and you don't want any pictures of your ex anywhere, ever. So it brings up all the pictures of your ex and then you click select and then you can click select all or you can pick out one, you know, individual ones if you want. But if you want to get rid of them, you search for them, select select all, delete and goodbye ex Not only physically, but mentally in your phone. All right. So that's how you delete multiples. Now when you when you think you're getting low storage and here's how you check that. Now you may not even notice this, you know, because the phone doesn't really react much differently until you get almost empty storage. But if you want to find out how much storage you have on an iPhone, you go to Settings General iPhone Storage, and it's self-explanatory right there, how much you have and how much you've used. And if you see it's all almost empty, that's when you really want to take advantage of this episode and clean it up. So let's say you do have low storage. Well, the first place to go is, is to go into those that collections and go to the media type and just pick videos because one small video could be 100 pictures. And so you look at the videos and you say, oh, I don't need that.
[00:08:20] That's crap. I was just showing my mechanic what my car was doing. Yeah, yeah, it might be 100MB or 50MB or whatever, but you want to get rid of that stuff so you can delete those. And I would, if it was me, I would go directly delete it permanently rather than 30 days, because it's still going to eat up space for 30 days in the recently deleted part C, so I'd get rid of the video. I'd go to videos first if I was low on space. Okay, so that's ways that you can declutter, uh, and, you know, clean up and have a much nicer library that whenever you look at it, you just love all the pictures you see, and you don't have to scroll for an hour to find one picture that you like. And, and we in part one and part two, we showed you how to find pictures and caption them and all kinds of stuff. So you want to check out. 1150 and 1155. All right, let's talk about backing them up a little bit. Now, if you have iCloud, which everybody does to a certain extent, you can make sure that it automatically backs up there and it syncs to all your other devices if you want it to. So, so you go to settings and then you tap on your name and then you tap iCloud. I used to say click all the time, but now I'm really getting the hang of.
[00:09:43] You're supposed to say tap when it's a phone. All right. So you go to settings, tap your name, tap iCloud and then toggle on the sync thing S, Y, n, C, and that puts it on all your devices. And then there's another setting that you may not know what it does, but I'm going to tell you right now and it's probably worthwhile. It's called optimize iPhone storage, optimize iPhone storage, say. So what that does is it leaves a smaller, lower quality. You may not be able to tell the difference even, but a smaller file size, lower quality thumbnail on your phone so that you reduce the amount of storage needed for that particular picture. But if you tap on the picture, there's a little thing there. It'll download the high quality version. You know, where depending on how fast your internet is from your iCloud, if you really need the high quality version. But most of us don't need the highest quality one for most just looking through, you know, showing people stuff. And, and so that's a way to really, you know, save a lot of space on your phone. All right. Now there's other ways to back up photos. And plus you can buy more storage super cheap on iCloud. I think I pay ten bucks a month for two terabytes and that's 10 billion. I don't know, photos and videos, but you can start out at $0.99 a month extra for, I think, 50GB.
[00:11:20] And I think it goes to 299 for I don't know how many. But anyways, dirt cheap storage and it's a way to save all your stuff. Important, important stuff. All right. But you can back up other ways. They have these little thumb drives now that do have a Usb-c side. Some of them have both a USB, A, the older style and a Usb-c. Well, you can plug that right into your iPhone and anything you want to back up, you just select that share thing, the little box with the up arrow on it, and then you pick the location you want to share it to. And in this case, you would share it to the thumb drive you just plugged in. Then you click export save, and then you wait because it takes a little while for it to, to, to put it all on the drive. But in the phone, there's no eject thing like there is on a Mac. So you just wait long enough where it's done, and then just go ahead and pull out the drive. Now there's other drives you can get. There's called SSD drives, SSD that's solid state drive, and HDD is a regular old style hard drive. And you can plug them in also to and do the same thing. Ssds are solid state so they're much more expensive. But you know you don't have a hard drive wearing out HDDs are cheaper. But they you know, they could wear out after a while or be damaged by bumping them and stuff like that.
[00:12:54] So, so anyway, that's how to back up some of your stuff. And then just one other bonus point here is you can print wirelessly. If you have a wireless printer, you can print right from your iPhone by going the share button, the same share thing, the square box with the up arrow, and then click print. And then you can print, you know, all kinds of stuff right there. So, so this is a way to declutter your phone and also just going through the process. Let's just see photos you forgot about years ago that you love and you can favorite it. So that way in your collections, you got your favorites. So they'll show up there in your favorites. Whenever you feel like getting a burst of energy, you pull up your favorite pictures or your kids or your dogs or, you know, your, your boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. So check out all three parts of this if you missed it. Screwthecommute.com/1150. Part one. Screwthecommute.com/1155 part two. And this is 1160 part three. And of course, check out my mentor program, greatinternetMarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV. That's the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.