4 Tools to Spring Clean your Digital Clutter
By FOREVER • March 27, 2025
Spring cleaning isn’t just for your home—it’s also a great time to organize and declutter your digital memories. With tools like Albums, Facial Recognition, and more, FOREVER Storage® makes it easy to streamline your collection.
Here are four key tools to help you get started:
1. Organize with Albums for Quick Access
One of the most effective ways to keep your digital memories organized is by creating albums. They allow you to group photos and videos by theme, event, or date, which makes it much easier to find exactly what you're looking for.
One option for organization is to create Core Collection albums for Vacations, Weddings, Professional Photos, School, Sports, Private/Medical (i.e., for documents), Careers, Church/Clubs/Groups (e.g., Rotary), Genealogy, Inspiration (i.e., for recipes, home), and Pets. To do this within your FOREVER account click 'Albums', then 'Add Album' to create each Core Collection.
Within each Core Collection album you can have nested albums too! Within an album, click the 3 dots then 'Add Nested'. Enter your album name then 'Create New Album'. Be specific! We suggest the Year – Month – Event Title (e.g., 2024_08 Colorado Road Trip). Do this for each event from your Core Collection.
Once you start using albums, the process of uploading and sorting new photos and videos becomes more structured, helping you stay organized moving forward.
2. Use the Declutter Tool to Easily Remove Unwanted Photos
Over time, digital collections can become cluttered with bursts of moments, rapid snapshots, or near-duplicate shots. The Declutter tool focuses on time-based grouping that simplifies the process of reviewing and cleaning up images. This feature helps you find and remove near-identical photos, making your collection leaner and easier to navigate.
To use it, simply navigate to your Gallery, an Album, or a specific Person or Tag in your FOREVER account, and select the 'Declutter' option. You can then adjust filters to group photos by time intervals, making it easier to find and delete unnecessary images.
Once you adjust your time intervals, you can click the 'X' on individual photos to delete them. Or, if you click on one of the photos in a grouping, it will let you batch select multiple images from within the grouping to remove or delete. In this view you can also see each photo's info panel to help distinguish one image from another, further helping you with your decision of which to remove.
3. Enhance Your Organization with Facial Recognition
Trying to identify and organize photos of people can be one of the most time-consuming parts of digital photo management. Fortunately, FOREVER Facial Recognition makes this process significantly easier.
FOREVER Facial Recognition uses AI to automatically detect the people in your photos, allowing you to quickly sort your collection by individual family members or friends. All you need to do is add a name to each person recognized, and FOREVER displays all the photos with that identified person! This is a huge time-saver, especially if you have thousands of photos to go through. It’s also great for helping you locate those rare family moments with a specific person, without needing to scroll through your entire collection. This is very helpful when creating a photo book of a specific person.
TIP: Sometimes facial recognition technology may mistakenly identify the same person as multiple individuals, especially if there are variations in lighting, angles, expressions, or age differences. To fix this, you can manually merge duplicate profiles on the People page by confirming they are the same person. This helps improve the AI and reduces future merging needs.
4. Add Fuzzy Dates for Flexible Chronology
Dates are essential for organizing your photos chronologically, but sometimes older photos or recently added ones may have missing or incorrect date information. Instead of getting stuck on the exact date, Fuzzy Dates allow you to add flexible date options, so you can still organize your photos with ease.
With Fuzzy Dates, you can select from a range of timeframes that work best for your memories. Whether you know the Exact Date & Time, Specific Day, Month & Year, Quarter & Year, Decade, or even Century, you can organize your photos around the timeframes that make the most sense to you.
This feature makes it much easier to sort and group your memories, even when you don’t have precise dates. It’s especially helpful for older photos, genealogy records, or any files where you only have a general timeframe. With Fuzzy Dates, you can filter and sort your collection based on what information is available, keeping your memories organized in a way that fits your needs.
TIP: There are two ways to add Fuzzy Dates. First, open an image in your FOREVER account and tap the info icon to adjust the date. Alternatively, you can select multiple photos, click 'Organize', and choose 'Bulk Organize' to adjust the date for all selected photos at once.
Utilizing these four tools—creating albums, decluttering similar images, using facial recognition, and adding fuzzy dates—will help you organize and streamline your digital memories in FOREVER this spring. We suggest dedicating just 15 minutes a day to keep your collection in order. This small effort will ensure you have an organized and accessible gallery of memories for years to come, ready for both you and future generations!