Holidays with kids: how do you organise all the photos afterwards?

The holiday is over. The suitcases are still half unpacked, and across three different phones there are maybe 800 photos between you. Somewhere in there is the best photo of your child ever taken, buried under 200 shots of the same beach.

Holiday photos with children are a category of their own. The first time your child sees the sea, the funny incident at the restaurant, the bedtime routines in an unfamiliar cottage. Precious, and easily lost in an overflowing camera roll that nobody scrolls through any more.

Photos on three phones: how to solve it

In most families everyone takes pictures: you, your partner, perhaps Grandma or Grandad too. After the holiday the best moments are spread across several devices and nobody has the energy to bring them all together. The best photos of your child never make it into an album, simply because nobody knows where they are.

Three systems that prevent this:

Option 1: a shared album, set up before you leave

Create a shared album before the holiday starts, so everyone uploads to it straight away. Three commonly used options:

• Google Photos shared album: create an album and share the link with your fellow travellers. Anyone with a Google account can add to it. Downside: everyone needs a Google account.
• iCloud shared album: works smoothly if everyone has an iPhone. Not suitable for families that mix Apple and Android.
• WhatsApp group: the easiest to get going, but photos arrive in low quality and vanish in a stream of messages.

Option 2: combine afterwards, with a selection

Didn't set up a shared album? Ask your partner and fellow travellers to send their best 20-30 holiday photos, explicitly not all 300, and make a curated album from those.

Being selective is the key here. A 10-day holiday is captured perfectly well in 50-100 photos.

Option 3: the holiday as a chapter in your child's diary

A diary app such as Ouderliefde lets you upload holiday memories with a date, location and description. Five years from now you can literally show your child: "This was your first time at the seaside. You were two and you just wouldn't touch the sand."

A "holiday 2024" folder in Google Photos gives you a list of files. Here the story sits alongside them, with the date and the place where it happened.

What 10 minutes every evening gets you

• Make a selection every evening: delete that day's failed photos and upload the best ones to your shared album or diary app. By the time you get home, it's already done.
• Label photos straight away: "first time at the sea", "the restaurant where everything went wrong", "the cottage". A short description while you still remember is worth its weight in gold later.
• Let the children take photos too: the pictures children take themselves are often the most fun to look back on. A cheap kids' camera or an old spare phone is enough.
• Take one group photo a day: just for the timeline, it doesn't have to be a good one. In 10 years it's lovely to see how you all looked each day.

After the holiday: what to do with all the videos

Videos are even trickier than photos. They take up more space and you rarely watch them again. Pick no more than 5-10 short clips you really want to keep and upload them to your diary app or a secure album. The rest you can delete.

For a nicer end result: make a short holiday montage with the built-in video editor on your iPhone (Photos → select photos → Create → Slideshow) or in Google Photos (Library → Movies → Create movie). It takes 5 minutes and gives you something your child will genuinely enjoy watching later.

Really reliving the holiday later

Three things keep holiday photos with children from being forgotten: a shared album before you leave, a 10-minute selection each day, and a fixed place for the best memories. You don't need much more than that.

Want to read more? Have a look at our guide to organising your child's photos or our article on what to do when your phone is full of photos of your children.