At one point I had about three thousand photos from nursery sitting in my Downloads folder with names like IMG_4471. Useless. You can't find anything, you don't dare delete anything, and so it just sits there growing. Here's the system I landed on. It's boring, which is exactly why it works, and you can do most of it in an evening.
Step one: one folder per child
Make a folder for each child somewhere sensible. Not Downloads. I keep mine in a "Photos" folder that gets backed up, with a subfolder per kid.
Inside each child's folder, make subfolders by year, or by term if your nursery thinks in terms. Something like:
- Maya
- 2024 Autumn
- 2025 Spring
- 2025 Summer
Then drag the photos into the right bucket. If they've got dates in the file or the photo info, this takes minutes. If they don't, rough guesses by clothes and seasons are fine. Don't be precious about it.
Step two: a quick favourites pass
Now go through and pull out the keepers. Not every photo, just the ones that make you smile. I aim for maybe one in ten.
Make a "Best of" subfolder inside each child's folder and copy your favourites in there. Copy, don't move, so the full set stays intact. This is the folder you'll actually use later for a photo book or a frame, and it saves you wading through the lot every time.
A tip that saved me hours: do this pass in one sitting per term while it's fresh, rather than letting a year build up. Forty photos to skim is fine. Eight hundred is a slog.
Step three: deal with duplicates
Nursery apps love sending the same group shot three times. To clear them out:
- On a Mac, the Photos app flags duplicates for you and offers to merge them.
- On Windows or anywhere, a free tool like dupeGuru finds matching files.
- Or just sort a folder by file size and eyeball the obvious twins.
Don't go mad here. Clearing the obvious doubles is enough. Hunting for every near-duplicate is a rabbit hole.
Step four: let the app do the searching
Once your originals are tidy, drop the whole lot into Google Photos or Apple Photos. The reason is search. Both can find faces, so you can pull up every photo of one child with a couple of clicks. Apple Photos can even find "beach" or "birthday cake" without you tagging a thing.
So you get the best of both: a clean, dated folder structure you control, plus a searchable copy you can rummage through on your phone.
One thing to sort first
None of this works if the photos are still trapped in the nursery app. You need the actual image files on your computer first. If yours are still in Famly, ParentZone or Bright Horizons FamilyApp, NurseryDownloader pulls the full-size originals down in bulk so you've got something to organise.
After that it's just folders and a quiet hour. Future you, hunting for a photo of a gappy-toothed three-year-old, will be very grateful.