Focusing on an annual family celebration is a great way to begin to learn how to curate some of your family photos that are stored on your phone as well as those in boxes in your closet. In this case, we’re going to focus on that special day that comes around in early May. Yes, I’m talking about the day when we celebrate the valiant, hard-working women that keep most families going. Moms. Mother’s Day!

Let’s be honest with one another. I bet your procrastination skills have grown exponentially if you have been thinking about pulling together all of your family’s photos into an organized collection. My go-to reaction and emotional response whenever I consider a project that I know is going to take an unknown amount of time is to, well, just put it off. Procrastinate. Stall. Forget about it for a month or so. And never get around to it. Think about it a lot, maybe, but never get started.

I would like to offer you a baby step that I believe will jump start the whole process and give you the confidence to move forward. And, who knows? You might just feel pretty darn proud of yourself for learning something new and getting something done. Actually, I can pretty much guarantee that you will.

The Power of Targeted Digital Searching

Let’s look at how to more easily search for and then gather all of the photos that you can find from Mother’s Day. We’ll start with digital photos on your phone.

Did you know that all of your digital photos are embedded with metadata? We have a video that explains more about this. Part of that stored metadata is the month, day and year that you took the photo. Since Mother’s Day occurs each year in May, you can narrow your photo search down to the month of May. 

iPhone Photo Library

To search through the photos in your iCloud library, just follow these steps on your phone:

1. Open Photos
2. At the bottom of the screen, you can either tap on Library then look just above in the gray bar where it says “Years – Months – Days – All Photos.” You could tap on Months and quickly swipe back to the months of May. A quicker route is to tap on the search icon at the bottom right and just search for “May.” 

Google Photo Library

I back up all of my iPhone photos in a Google Photos account and their Search tools are easy to use, too. Just type “May” in the search bar and you’ll get all the photos from that month that are currently in your library. Just scroll through to see if you have any photos from a Mother’s Day gathering.

Selecting & Storing Your Digital Photo Finds

Now that you have located some Mother’s Day photos (or whatever family celebration you’re collecting), it’s time to store them together for future family story use.

From iPhone Photo Library

For now, it’s fine to just keep the photos you found in your iPhone Photo Library there, but you will want to put them together in an album. If you need to learn how to do that, here’s an article + a video to show you how.

From Google Photos

To gather your Google Photos into an album, follow these steps.

If you want to create your album first before searching:

1. At the bottom of the screen on the far right, tap on Library.
2. On the next screen, look for Albums and tap the + symbol to create a new album. Add a Title. Tap the < symbol at the top left to go back to your photos.
3. Find the photos you want and then press and hold on each one to select them.
4. Tap on “Add to album” at the bottom of the screen and then find the album you already made.

If you have already found some photos and want to create an album for them as your next step:

1. Press and hold on each photo that you want to select.
2. Tap on “Add to album” at the bottom of the screen.
3. Tap on “+ New album” and create a new album.
4. As you continue to search for photos, follow steps #3 and #4 from above to add them to your album.

Searching Old Print Photos

You might think I have a magic tip for finding old printed Mother’s Day photos, but I think you and I both know that you’re just going to have to dig into what is stored in your albums or boxes. I’m sorry it’s going to take longer, but not sorry that you are probably going to have fun looking through photos.

Don’t get too stressed, though. This time you’ll be searching with the power of a targeted search. You’ll be looking for photos that will generally be grouped with others that are likely to be from early summer. You’ll know you’re getting closer when you start spotting pictures of you playing outside in shorts and sneakers!

In my searches, I remembered that we generally went to my grandmother’s house in Batesville, Arkansas for a gathering of my aunts, uncles and cousins from my Mom’s side of the family. Summer photos with my Arkansas cousins are a big clue that I’m getting closer. In fact, one of my favorite Mother’s Day photos is from the year when my Dad thoughtfully captured a large group photo and then took individual family photos. These have become very precious to our family since so many of these folks are no longer with us. Thanks, Dad!

Storing Your Photo Print Finds

When you find those special photos from the Mother’s Day celebrations from your childhood, put them together in a safe place like a small sturdy shoebox or a plastic bin. Make sure and label them for future family story use.

Happy Photo Collecting!