Every year or so I go through my photos since the last time and cull whatever photos I’ve taken in a manner similar to what he describes at the end of this article. While I agree the process largely needs to be done by hand, there are components that could be automated and technology could aid in the process.

For example, rather than showing me all my photos in chronological order, it would be amazing if there was a way to group photos first by event - say someone’s birthday party. As a parent of young children, I don’t want to have no photos of a certain visit with grandma, but I also don’t want or need 50 photos of that visit. If my photos were first grouped by event, I could aim to keep 1 or 2 photos and be a lot quicker and more ruthless and culling photos from that event.

Once shown as events, technology could certainly highlight or group the photos that were all taken in quick succession. Often I take a lot of photos while trying to hit the exact moment my children are all looking.

Then, technology could likely intelligently highlight photos that are blurry or maybe even all the shots that I accidentally hit while putting the phone back in my pocket and so show only the floor or something. Seeing these highlighted would make it much quicker to delete photos.

I am sure there are more simple processes that could be included that would allow people to cull photos down from 1000s to 10s in a short period.