Here’s a stress-free way to unclutter old photos on your phone

Of all the ways smartphones have changed our lives over the years, the camera function might be the most unsung. So many of us take it for granted that we’ll always have a way to record our lives, from the biggest moments to the most banal. In fact, that’s exactly what we do — and our photo galleries pile up with unwanted pics and duplicates of ones we already have.

It can be a problem, even if you have a cloud storage option that keeps all this clutter from filling your phone to capacity. The more photos you have, the harder they are to sort. Nobody has time to scroll through and pick thousands of images for deletion, so a TikToker named Kayla Kerr at @kaylakerr_ proposes an elegant but gradual fix that echos the Five a Day decluttering method: Don’t do it all at once.

MORE: How to clean out your phone to free up storage space

Lifehacker, spreading the tip to its readers, recommends that every day, you simply search your general photo album for the current date, but omit the year. The results will pull up every picture you’ve ever taken on that day over multiple years for as long as you’ve had the phone.

From there, it should take less than a minute to go through and delete all the ones you no longer want. Do that every day, and in a year you’ve trimmed all the fat from your album.

We recommend you get into the habit of doing it before you go to bed so you can do a clean sweep that includes the current day. For those who need a little discipline to get started, it’s easy enough to set a reminder on your phone using the alarm function on your clock. You can also use the Calendar app if a simple screen notification will do.

If you need a productivity app that allows easy entry for this and other tasks, TickTick is a good option for Apple devices that you can find in the App Store. Once you’ve got all those favorite photos in one place, the Slidebox app (available for Apple or Android devices) gives you a good way to organize them into folders and a “swipe-and-delete” feature that makes future cleanup easier. However, it doesn’t currently support videos.

MORE: How to take hands-free photos and other iPhone hacks you may not know

Happy photo hunting!