Clean up your gallery after a trip: what to do with hundreds of photos and videos
You get home from a trip with six hundred photos and a phone that will not back up. Half of them are the same sunset four times over, plus a nine-minute video of a street you have already forgotten. The memories are in there. So is a lot of duplicate weight. Here is how I clean up after a trip without deleting the shots I will want in ten years.
The three things a trip leaves behind
Similar photos (you took five to get one good one), bursts, and long videos. iOS has a Duplicates album (Photos, Albums, Duplicates) that catches exact copies, but it does not catch near-identical shots, and that is where most trip clutter actually lives.
Keep the best of each near-identical set
Gallery Checkup groups similar photos so you compare the almost-the-same shots side by side and keep the winner. One at a time, calm, favorites protected. This is the bundle that gives back the most on trip photos, because we all take five of everything now.
Long videos: trim, do not trash
That nine-minute clip is probably ten good seconds. Instead of deleting the whole thing, trim it to the part you want, or compress it to 1080p. The app does both on the device and saves a new file, so a single long video can hand back hundreds of megabytes.
Where the memories should actually live
A trip is the one time cross-app linking is honest: log the countries or states you visited in Stamp Hunt (or Stamp Hunt Brasil), and split the group bills from photos of receipts with FastBillSplit. The memory survives even after you thin out the camera roll. For the full routine, see freeing up iPhone storage.
My rule after every trip: clean it within the week, while I still remember which blurry photo was the good one.