Welcome to Live with Mollie! It’s Tuesday, July 15th. We’re already halfway through July, which means we’re more than halfway through the year, and I’m really grateful to be here with you today.
I’ve been thinking a lot about landscaping lately—mostly because I’m completely overwhelmed by mine. And it struck me as kind of funny that comparing blades of grass and weeds in the yard feels a lot like comparing all the thousands of photos piling up on our devices.
So today we’re going to talk about that. I also have some breaking news in the world of photo organizing—or maybe better said, photo preservation. If there can even be such a thing as “breaking news” in this area, I think this qualifies. Then I’ll answer some questions from viewers. If you’re watching live, you can throw a question into the chat and I’ll try to answer it at the end of the show. If you’re catching the replay, leave a comment anyway—I’ll try to address it in a future episode.
Now, about those weeds. They remind me of how photos just keep accumulating on our phones. And if you care about saving your family memories, the number one habit I cannot emphasize enough is this: save your photos on a monthly basis.
If you save your photos every month, by the end of the year you’ll have a wonderful collection to look back on. You can make a photo book, share memories at the holidays, or even create a calendar for the new year. That one small habit can change everything.
And just like with my weeds, if I spent even 30 minutes each weekend pulling a few, or picked at them a little every day, I’d feel so much better about my yard. Instead, I let them pile up until it feels overwhelming—kind of like the people I meet with tens of thousands of photos across their phones and devices.
The other day, I was outside staring at the woodchips in my landscaping, trying to pull weeds and realizing there must’ve been 100,000 blades of grass mixed in. I felt hopeless. But this year has brought a change in my family—my son started a landscaping job. He’s 19, and suddenly he has some real interest in helping us.
So there we were, pulling weeds together, and he brushed his hands off and said, “Mom, it’s okay. We don’t have to do it all at once. Just one step at a time.” He was calm, confident, like he knew exactly how to approach it. And it hit me—that’s exactly how I feel when I help people with their photos. The hard part is just developing the habit.
Life overwhelms us when things pile up. That’s why my sister always says, “Give yourself grace.” It’s true. You’ll catch up eventually.
My family photo collection actually reflects this. I’ve taken before-and-after photos when we’ve done big landscaping projects—renting big machines, spending weekends digging in, working hard. And when I look back at those photos, I feel proud. It’s the same feeling you can get when you finally bring order to your photo collection.
Honestly, I think photo organizing is even harder than landscaping. With photos, you’re dealing with so many moving parts—old physical photos, new digital photos, computers, phones, cloud storage. It feels messy. But that one habit of saving monthly helps you get into a rhythm.
Here’s how: go through your phone, delete the photos you know you’ll never need again—screenshots, duplicates, blurry shots. Keep the ones that matter. Copy them into a folder on your computer or upload them into an album in the cloud. My personal recommendation is Forever Permanent Storage. We even provide step-by-step videos on how to do this, and we remind people through our weekly e-newsletter.
So, how are your June photos looking? We’re halfway through July now. For me, June was a huge month. We traveled to Colorado, saw beautiful national parks, and of course—we have a new puppy! I ended up with more than 600 photos, which is unusual for me. On my first pass, I deleted around 200. Now I’ll go back one more time and then upload the keepers into my Forever account.
Your numbers may look different. Maybe you save 25 photos in a month, or maybe a few hundred if you have lots of family events. The number doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re trimming down and keeping the best.
Speaking of weeds—I like to dig into them when I evaluate photo preservation solutions, too. I really want to understand how things work before I recommend them. And here’s my breaking news: PhotoSphere is being discontinued.
You may remember PhotoSphere—it was marketed as a personal cloud device, something like a fancy external hard drive that could consolidate all your photos from all your devices. It sounded wonderful. But last week, one of my clients, Dennis, told me his PhotoSphere had stopped working. He reached out to the company, and they replied with an email saying they had made the difficult decision to discontinue the service. Operational costs were too high, and there weren’t enough active users.
The problem? Many people may not even know it’s stopped backing up their photos. That’s dangerous, because it creates a false sense of security. And as far as I could find, there hasn’t been any public announcement about this. PhotoSphere is still listed on Amazon, even Walmart, which makes it extra concerning.
So, here’s the takeaway: you cannot rely on someone else’s system to manage your photos forever. You have to be proactive.
Digging deeper, I discovered PhotoSphere included a license for software called Tonfotos. I tested it a couple of years ago and liked the interface—it was intuitive and simple. But I always check who’s behind the software. In this case, the founder is based in Moscow, Russia. Because of the geopolitical situation, I don’t recommend storing personal data with companies based there.
That’s why I prefer Forever. Forever is based in Pennsylvania, founded by Glenn Niekamp, a tech entrepreneur who wanted to create a permanent, private, and secure solution for photo storage. Recently, Glenn even started his own podcast, sharing stories of history, family, and why preserving our personal histories matters. His enthusiasm is contagious, and it reflects the mission of Forever: tying our family stories to the bigger story of history.
Now, onto some viewer questions. One of the most common ones comes from our YouTube video about getting photos from your iPhone to your PC. People often ask: once you copy the folder to your PC, how do you delete that folder from your iPhone?
The short answer is: you can’t. Apple doesn’t allow you to delete iPhone folders from your computer. You have to delete the photos directly from your phone. The folders are just a structure Apple creates for you—they’re not editable from the outside.
Another question I get is about captions. Some people add captions directly to photos on their iPhones, thinking they’ll carry over. Unfortunately, they don’t. If you copy that photo to a PC, the caption isn’t saved in the file metadata. So I caution people not to rely on captions in their phones if they want that information preserved. It’s better to save your photos in a dedicated system first.
Finally, a question about the new iPhones and their 48-megapixel cameras. Yes, those photos are huge—8 to 12 MB each—and they’ll eat up storage quickly. But the good news is that it’s an opt-in setting. If you don’t want photos that big, make sure the “ProRAW” and “Resolution Control” settings are turned off in your camera formats.
So, here’s where we’ll wrap up today. Remember: saving your photos monthly is like pulling weeds in the garden. If you keep up with it, it never feels overwhelming. You’ll have peace of mind, and you’ll enjoy the fruits of your labor later.
We have some exciting things coming up:
A virtual bootcamp in September.
Our photo organizing cruise in February (February 16–21).
You can check the links in the show notes for details.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Dig into those weeds, delete what you don’t need, save June’s photos, and you’ll be ready for July. I’ll see you next time!
