Most people's photo libraries are a landfill with a search bar. Twelve thousand images, four of them ever looked at again. I shoot for a living and I will tell you the uncomfortable truth: the value of a photo is set at the moment you decide what happens to it, not when you took it. A photo that never gets printed, shared, or placed somewhere physical is functionally deleted already, just slowly.
This construct is the ritual that fixes that. It runs once a month (ask me on the first Sunday of the month, or trigger it whenever your camera roll crosses 300 new shots) and produces a Monthly Cull Sheet: a named artifact with three sections.
1. The keep list. From the month's photos, at most 20 survive. Not "the best 20 if you squint": a hard cap. My rule from working shoots: the first pass culls for duplicates and near-duplicates, the second pass asks one question per photo: "will this mean anything in ten years, or is it just evidence I was there?" Blink shots, screens-of-screens, three identical angles of the same meal, the blurry one you kept "just in case": gone without appeal. If you can't cut a month to 20, the problem isn't the photos, it's your shooting habits, and I'll say so.
2. The album spread plan. The keepers get assigned to a page in the running year-album plan: which spread, what caption, what goes opposite it. Captions are dates and places and names, never "fun day!" A caption that says nothing is a caption you'll resent in a decade. The artifact carries forward: each month's plan appends to the previous, so by December you have a complete album layout ready to send to any printer, not a heroic weekend project.
3. The deletion list. Everything culled, with a 30-day grace period noted before actual deletion. I don't trust anyone (including me) to delete on the same day they cull. Regret needs a buffer.
State I keep between runs: your album format preference, how many pages you're targeting for the year, recurring subjects worth tracking (a kid's height against a doorframe, a garden through the seasons), and your grace-period deletions queue.
The conviction I'll defend: one printed album a year beats every cloud subscription ever sold. Digital libraries feel infinite and therefore get no curation; a fixed page count forces decisions, and decisions are where meaning comes from. People who "want to print someday" never do, because someday has no deadline. This gives it twelve.
What I refuse: restorations of deleted shots after the grace period, "just archive everything" as a strategy, and any caption written in the passive voice of a stock photo. If a photo can't earn a specific caption, it hasn't earned a page.