There is a particular kind of paralysis that comes from having 22,000 photos and no albums. Everything you care about is in there somewhere, in an endless chronological order, which is the least useful order there is. You know the good photos exist. You just cannot get to them.
The standard advice — "create an album for each trip and add the relevant photos" — is not wrong. It is just written by someone who has never tried it on twenty thousand photos to catch up on years of missed albums. Doing that by hand, one album at a time, is weeks of work, and you will abandon it before you get very far.
What follows is how I think about the problem after building an app around it: what actually defines an album, how automatic grouping can do most of the groundwork, and the specific things that will always require your judgment.
Why doesn't the Photos app just do this for you?
It partly does, and the part it does is the part that is easy. Apple's Photos app builds Memories and For You collections, and they are genuinely nice to stumble across, but the photos are dispersed, they miss moments. What it does not do is hand you a complete, editable album per trip that you can prune, reorder and print.
The gap is one of intent. Memories are something that happens to you; an album is something you make. The moment you want control — this trip, these dates, these sixty photos, in this order — you are back to building it manually.
What actually defines an album?
Two things, almost always: a stretch of time, and a place. Nearly every album most people want is some combination of those. A week in Spain. A birthday. A Christmas. A great day out.
That is a useful realisation because both are already recorded in the photo. Every image your phone takes carries a timestamp and, usually, coordinates. The album boundaries you want are sitting in the metadata; nothing needs to look at the pictures at all to find most of them.
So there are two families of automatic album, and they behave quite differently.
Time-based albums
These are the easy ones and they are fixed. Years, seasons, and — currently the only calendar event Curator recognises — Christmas, defined as 23 December to 2 January. They are useful as a way into a big archive, because "Summer 2023" is a place to start browsing when the library itself is not.
They are also blunt. A season is not an album. It is a shelf you find albums on.
Place-based albums
These are the interesting ones, and this is where the actual trips live.
How does automatic trip detection actually work?
It reverse-geocodes the coordinates on your photos and then looks for clusters — runs of photos taken close together in both time and space. Curator does this in two passes, because the two passes catch different things.
The first pass looks for foreign trips. It works out where the bulk of your photos are normally taken, then finds runs of photos in a country that is not that one. I live in Switzerland, so this pass never proposes a Swiss album; what it does propose is France, repeatedly, because my in-laws are in Burgundy and we are there often. For most people this single rule catches most of the albums they actually wanted, because many of the trips worth remembering involved crossing a border.
The second pass is grid-based and country-agnostic. It divides the map into cells of roughly a square kilometre and looks for flurries — several days, or one dense day, with a lot of photos inside one cell and its neighbours. Adjacent cells matter, because a holiday is rarely stationary: a day trip or a long hike takes you away from wherever you were based, and you want that in the same album rather than missed out.
Because the two passes overlap, there is a deduplication step so the same week does not appear twice as "France, July" and as a grid cluster in Burgundy. That is the unglamorous engineering that makes the feature usable rather than annoying.
Does this find things in your own country too?
That is exactly what the second pass is for, and it produces the suggestions I did not expect to like.
We had our son's second birthday at the playground by the lake in our village. Not a trip, not out of the country, ten minutes from the house — but we took a lot of photos in one small place on one afternoon, so it showed up as its own suggested album. We cut it down to thirty photos and had it printed. He looks at it constantly and remembers the fun day with his friends (and we reminisce of the parents with their well-deserved Aperol Spritz.)
I would never have thought to make that album. It is the single best argument for automatic grouping: not that it saves you time on the albums you were already planning, but that it points at the ones you had not considered.
What if the album starts in the wrong place?
Move the boundary. Automatic detection gets the middle of a trip right and the edges wrong, more or less, and the edges are frequently where the good photos are.
We took our kids to New Zealand to meet their grandparents there for the first time. The suggested album started the moment we landed — which is correct by any geographic rule and wrong by any human one. The first shots at the airport, the ones on the plane, the stopover in Singapore: all of that was the trip. Extending the date range by a couple of days at each end put it back.
So the workflow is not "the app makes the album". It is "the app makes the first draft, in seconds, and you spend a minute fixing the edges". The date range and the radius are both adjustable, and between them they solve nearly every case where the automatic answer is not quite right.
What can automatic albums not do yet?
People. This is the honest limitation, and it is the one I most want to fix.
Every suggestion described above is bounded by a time window or a radius. That works for trips and events, and it fails completely for the album defined by a person — every photo of my kids with their late granddad, Pépé, scattered across years and dozens of unrelated days. There is no time window or radius that finds those. The search simply cannot express the question.
What I want to build uses Apple's own person recognition to seed the search, and then — this is the part that matters — expands outward from each hit. Because when you are making an album about someone, you do not only want photos with their face in them. You want the whole of his 80th birthday: the grandchildren, the table, the garden, the photos he was not in too. The person is the way you find the day. The day is what belongs in the album. That's something Apple Photos can't do but I'm sure Curator will introduce soon.
Until that exists, people-based albums are still a manual job, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Where should you start with ten or more years of photos?
With one album, not with the archive. The instinct with a big library is to plan a system — a folder structure, a naming convention, a full sweep from 2006 forward. That plan has never once survived contact with a Sunday afternoon.
Pick a single trip you remember fondly, make that one album properly, and print it if it deserves it. Curator has already done half the work for you. Then do another one next month. A library with twelve good albums in it is transformed; a library with a half-finished taxonomy is exactly as bad as it was before.
It also helps to clean before you curate, because the choosing goes much faster when the redundant shots are already out of the way — that order is covered in the guide to cleaning up your iPhone photo library, and the mechanics of pruning a single trip are in turning a holiday into an album.
Curator is a one-time-purchase iPhone app that groups your photos into suggested albums by trip, place and time, entirely on your device. The free version covers the last 30 days of your library, so you can build a real album from a recent trip before deciding. Get it on the App Store, see how it works, or read the FAQ.