The 5-minute system for getting on top of your camera roll

This is the transcript of The Refreshing Leadership Podcast episode: The 5-minute system for getting on top of your camera roll, published on 26th January 2026.

Do you know how many photos you have on your phone? And more importantly, when you open up your phone library, does it feel enjoyable or overwhelming?

For me, for a long time, mine felt completely out of control. January is always a declutter month for me, and I try to take that a bit deeper every year.

One year I went back to my parents' place, collected all my old things, brought them home, and found proper homes for everything. This year I realised there was something that had been bothering me for ages but that I hadn't confronted - my photo situation.

I care a lot about memories. I am the family photo person. When I was young I made physical albums - the ones where you slot photos in - and scrapbooks. As digital albums became available, I made loads of those too, the ones you design and have sent to you in the post.

When the kids were first born I used to put together albums of their first three months, their first year. But at some point - between work, a masters, moving house, and general life admin - that system fell apart. What I ended up with was almost a decade of photos sitting in iCloud that I didn't fancy looking at. It was just too overwhelming.

That's the paradox of our age. We can document every moment, every concert, every birthday. We can get the perfect shot, take multiple versions of each one. We have more ability to capture than ever before - and yet somehow I felt completely blocked from being able to access any of it. If I wanted to go back to a particular event, there was just too much volume, too many photos, too much media to trawl through.

So in this episode I want to share a very simple routine I've been doing five minutes at a time, that has been helping me do this digital photo declutter without it becoming a massive project.

Why five minutes works

Before I get into the system, I want to give credit to two people.

The first is Laura Vanderkam, who has talked a lot about making big goals manageable by doing tiny chunks each day. She read War and Peace in one year because it has 360-plus chapters, each individually quite short. A door-stopper of a novel, read over the course of a year without it taking over.

The second is Kendra Adachi of the Lazy Genius, who introduced the idea of the daily delete - setting a five minute timer on your phone and using it to delete photos. That's the core of the idea. Everything else I'm sharing comes from doing this myself since around Christmas.

Where to start

When you set your five minute timer, you could go to your most recent photos and work backwards. What I found more useful was starting with January of the previous year. That uses the passage of time in your favour.

We all have screenshots, receipts, QR codes, and random notes on our phones. If those were recent, I might worry I still needed them. But when a year has passed, it feels like a no-brainer to clear them out - like finding something in the fridge so far past its sell-by date that you feel no guilt throwing it away.

Getting some quick wins first

I want to talk about something called the Goal Gradient Hypothesis. The closer you are to achieving a goal, the more your brain marshals its resources to get you over the line. That's why breaking goals down into smaller components is so effective - you get more of those motivational boosts along the way.

With what I think was 70-plus thousand photos and hundreds of gigabytes of media, I needed some big wins early on to stop it feeling so overwhelming.

If you have an iPhone, go into your photos and look for the duplicates folder. Apple automatically highlights genuine duplicates but also flags suspected ones and gives you the option to merge. That's an immediate quick win. You can merge all the actual duplicates straight away, then quickly work through the rest.

On other days, go to a specific folder like selfies. Instagram and photo culture generally have a lot to answer for here - no one needs 14 versions of the same picture. When you're going back and reviewing, none of those tiny differences seem important. If your past self bothered to favourite the best one, you can just delete the rest.

Videos are another big win from a storage perspective. You can either go back to your oldest video within the photos app and work forwards chronologically, or go to your iCloud storage in settings, click manage storage, and your media will appear in size order - largest first. That way you can delete the biggest files and feel the impact immediately.

I oscillate between these depending on my mood. What I like about working within the photos app is that you can favourite things as you go. You can't do that when deleting from iCloud storage directly.

Keeping it sustainable

One thing I'll say - this can get oddly addictive. Especially when I wasn't well over Christmas, I was sometimes going well beyond five minutes. I noticed quite quickly that it's intense on the eyes and I'd end up with eye strain. So now I'm strict about the timer. Some days I'll decide I'll only watch one video all the way through, so I don't overdo it.

I'm currently around May or June of last year. There's something lovely about that element of reflection - going back through a year, month by month.

The kids have also got involved. They've seen me doing this and love watching early videos of themselves. My son found a video of himself having a tantrum at around 4.40pm, and the very next video showed him in the garden at 5pm with a big paint roller, painting his slide with mud. As happy as Larry. I asked him what he was doing and he said "I'm painting my shed." I asked what colour and he said "mud." The contrast of those two videos, and the timing showing how that late afternoon unfolded during COVID - that was absolutely priceless.

Becoming more mindful about photos going forward

One of the unexpected benefits of this process is that I'm now more mindful when I'm taking photos.

Going through your camera roll item by item, every single day, has a very different impact on you.

Recently my son was having a haircut and it was so cute. I took about seven pictures - but I quickly favourited the one I liked best, thinking: my future deleting self is going to really appreciate that. Even if I take more than one photo in the moment, I now try to make it easy to delete later by favouriting the best ones straight away.

Before you get started

Take a screenshot of your iCloud storage, your photo storage, and your number of photos. I didn't quite manage to do this right at the start, but I did it fairly early on. It's going to be really satisfying to look back and see how much progress you've made.

What to do with the photos you keep

I don't think I'm in an era now where I'll be making digital albums anymore. Instead I have two other parts to my system.

The first is the One Second Everyday app. You upload a daily photo and it selects a 1.5-second clip. Over the course of a year it puts them all together into a gorgeous mashup of your whole year. I've been doing this for years, though I'll be honest - there have been months and months at a time when I've forgotten, and then backfilled in December or January. This year my daughter pointed out that the whole of June and July were missing. And that's fine. Even when it's patchy, it still tells a brilliant story. Now that I'm sorting through the photos month by month, it's going to be so much easier to pick good pictures for those gaps.

The second is my Aura frame. My husband received one and I loved it so much I got another. It's a digital photo frame with a very user-friendly app - you can upload directly from your phone and stream an album straight to the frame. We have one in the kitchen, so we see it every day. Compared to the albums that sit on a shelf waiting to be opened, this means we get to enjoy our memories as part of daily life. After a trip, I'll just upload those photos to the frame and set how long each one stays on screen.

Between the One Second Everyday app, the Aura frame, and this five minute daily delete process, it's starting to feel like I have a cohesive system. Whether I ever reach a point where I feel fully on top of my photos or not, I'm enjoying the process. It's easy, it's fun, and it fits with my life.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

If you've got any questions for me, you can find me on Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message there.

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About Maya

Maya Gudka is an executive coach specialising in C-suite career progression and leadership development. She works with senior leaders in major organisations on strategic career planning, executive presence, and building sustainable influence. Maya hosts The Refreshing Leadership Podcast, which ranks in the top 2% of podcasts globally and has nearly 300 episodes exploring the challenges faced by ambitious professionals.