RV Hacks: Travel Photo Library Management Tip and a New Book!

Once you’ve been on the road a while, you inevitably start to accumulate a ton of photos.

And not all of them blog worthy shots.

In fact, some of them might be downright awful.

Like those shots of inside your pocket, blurry attempts at capturing a rainbow, or hundreds of photos trying to capture your cat actually looking AT the camera with just the right facial expression.

But in a digital age, it’s easy to leave all those photos there – just sucking up storage space. Not to mention bandwidth to sync to cloud back-ups. Having all this cruft around just adds delays to searching your own history.

But to go back and organize and delete out decades of digital photos?!? Who has the time?

Lately, Chris and I have been experimenting with an actually fun way to manage all those old photos.

So here’s our newest little life hack that we’re just calling our ‘Day in History Purge’.

This Day In History Photo Ritual

Every day, we make it a ritual to open up our photo library and search for the current date without a year. We use Apple Photos as our library, so over this past holiday weekend in the search bar we just typed ‘7/4’.

And what a trip down memory lane!

As we weed the library of bad old photos, the chore of it all is replaced by the fun of reminiscing about the past.

This past weekend, it was all about remembering back to where we celebrated Independence Day for each of our 14 years on the road together.

2007 – Black Rock Desert

2008 – Melbourne, FL

2009 – Philadelphia, PA

2010 – Melbourne, FL

2011 – Lake Havasu, AZ

2012 – St. Louis, Air Show

2013 – Billings, MT

2014 – Alpena, MI

2015 – Seward, AK. Fireworks at midnight!

2016 – New York, Harvest Host

2017 – Ft. Meyers, FL

2018 – New Smyrna Beach

2019 – Charleston, SC

2020 – Sanford, FL

2021 – Sanford, FL

• 2007 – My first trip to the Black Rock Desert for ‘Fourth of Juplaya’ – helping the Burning Man infrastructure team test out their Wi-Fi in advance of the upcoming Black Rock City build.
• 2008 – Back at my home in Florida after our first 7-month trial road trip, closing down the house to get it ready to sell and go pick up our custom spec’d Oliver Travel Trailer.
• 2009 – At a great backyard party with live music while we were visiting friends in Philadelphia. It was cool to celebrate the fourth at a house that was older than our nation!
• 2010 – In Florida with my dad after his surgery to remove a lung after his initial diagnosis with cancer (he’d pass less than 3 years later).
• 2011 – In the wicked 131 degree heat of Lake Havasu, AZ after moving into our vintage bus (can you believe it’s been 10 years?!?!). We were driveway surfing with friends while we got Zephyr road worthy. Other dear friends Ben & Karen (CreativeCruiser) surprised us with a visit to welcome us to bus life.
• 2012 – In St. Louis visiting Chris’ family, we had to retreat to the Casino Queen RV Resort to find full 30A hookups because of the 110 degree temperatures. So we celebrated the 4th along the shores of the Mississippi, watching an amazing 3-day air show and nightly fireworks right across the river from us in front of the Arch.
• 2013 – Living in a shop parking lot in Billings, MT going on week 2 or 3 of our engine rebuild after Zephyr’s 2-stroke overheated. We had gone to MT to spread some of my dad’s ashes, the only state he never got to visit while alive.
• 2014 – In Alpena, MI on our sunrise coast tour while we were writing the 2nd edition of The Mobile Internet Handbook (now retired), and launching the Mobile Internet Resource Center website (now our professional focus). We had just come off launching RVillage, and also signed on to help launch Xscapers. What a summer!
• 2015 – In Seward, AK on our 6-week backpacking adventure by train, cruise ship, rental RV and hitching rides with other RVing bloggers touring the state that summer. We enjoyed the fireworks shot off at midnight (closest thing to dark) aboard Ben & Rebecca’s (His & Hers Travels) boat with dear friend Kristin (Snowmads).
• 2016 – Parked at a Harvest Hosts location and then driveway surfing with new friends in New York.
• 2017 – Our first 4th aboard our new boat, in Ft. Meyers, FL. We were amazed to discover that the city fireworks would be shot right near the marina, giving us front row seats. A trend that we would discover is actually quite common in boat life.
• 2018 – Our second 4th on the boat, we found ourselves taking a respite in New Smyrna Beach at the city marina and again having front row seats to the city fireworks.
• 2019 – Continuing our Great Loop, we took a month long stay in Charleston, SC at the Maritime Center – and once again had front row seats for the city fireworks shot from right across the river by the Yorktown aircraft carrier. We enjoyed the view with new friends Lyn & Mark after they literally bumped into us docking their boat. Amazing! This would be as far north as we’d get on the Great Loop before life intervened with family medical stuff, hurricane season and well, a little pandemic.
• 2020 – Situated in Sanford, FL – our chosen home base for the pandemic. Like most everywhere else, official fireworks were canceled. But we still enjoyed a socially distanced evening onboard Y-Not watching private displays along the lakeshore with dear local friends Sabine & Eckhard.

• 

  2021 – Having heard that we’d have truly front row seats for the official fireworks in Sanford, I’m not quite sure we were prepared for just what that meant. My mom came over, and Sabine & Eckhard joined us again this weekend – and we watched the city’s all-out display – launched literally right across the marina fairway from our boat. It was so close, we were advised to have a water hose ready – just in case! It was breathtaking.

But it’s not just about exploring the past.

While we’re looking at the day in history, we go through and delete all those fuzzy, blurry or duplicate shots that we just don’t need.

And maybe we favorite the really awesome shots we forgot about.

And if we’re really ambitious, maybe we take the time to properly label our photos for easier retrieval later (nah, that’s too much work).

And then we repeat the process the next day.

Trimming out our photo library, day by day.

Slowly but surely reducing our library size and the number of photos we sync to all our devices.

Done this way, it’s not an overwhelming task, it’s instead a nice jog down memory lane. And in a year’s time we’ll have significantly tamed the beast of our photo archives.

RV Hacks – The Book

Our dear friends Marc & Julie of RV Love are releasing their next book – RV Hacks – on July 13.

Like their last best seller Living the RV Life this one is also professionally published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

And we’re absolutely honored that they again asked us (and other experienced RVing friends) to contribute to the book.

There are tons of hacks on driving, repairs, camping, organization, technology and families/pets.

We added a handful of hacks on mobile internet (hacks 333, 336, 338-343), of course – as well as a couple others.

We hadn’t come up with the above photo hack yet or we would have submitted that too – so consider this one a bonus. But if you’d like 400+ more awesome ideas to make your RV travels easier, safer and more fun – go pre-order a copy now.

And Marc & Julie – way to go guys! You are adding so much value to the RVing community!