On the surprisingly difficult task of choosing a photo

There’s a moment in most people’s year when they think:
”I should really do something with all these photos.”

Maybe it’s December. Or a birthday coming up. Maybe it’s just a quiet Sunday and you’re finally clearing out your phone. Or you’re sitting in a waiting room (that’s me).

You scroll through a year’s worth of images - some near-identical, some hilarious, some quietly lovely - and suddenly you’re supposed to pick just a few.
The ones that matter most.

For many people, that’s the moment it stops being fun.

One person I was chatting to - let’s call her Claire - armed herself with a plan. She planned to make a photo book of her daughter’s year.
She split the photos into months, carefully chose the top ones for each month, pre-edited everything, and set up folders with her name.
“I was trying to be ruthless,” she told me. “I thought if I did all that prep, it would be easier.”

But the photo book never got made.

“It’s just such a relentless process,” she said. “You need so much focus to do it properly.”

Another person told me she gives herself two full days at the end of every year to make a photo book for her partner.
No kids- just a shared life full of travel, food, and cats and horses. She starts at 10am, finishes around 11pm, and then lies awake until 3am. “Too much screen. Too much emotion. Too many choices,” she said. “It wrecks me. But I can’t not do it.”

That bit - the choosing - is what a lot of people hate.

Especially when the photos are emotionally loaded. When you’re trying to represent something that spanned weeks or months: a summer, a birthday, a friendship, a feeling. Something that lived in time but now needs to fit on a page.

Some people love comparing 17 photos of the same moment (well, actually very few it seems), hunting for the one where something intangible clicks. Others find that unbearable.
It’s not that they don’t care.
It’s that they care too much.
How do you choose? What even counts out of thousands of moments? How do you build that story?

Photographers have to answer that question all the time.
On a commissioned shoot, we often shoot thousands of frames in a single day.
Then we cut them down to a handful. We do it again the next day. And again.
If it’s a five-day shoot, we do the same each day. And then at the end, we zoom out and select just the 20 or so (depending on the commission) that capture the shape of the experience - not every moment, but the ones that help you feel it again.

You can do that too.
But first, you need to define what output you’re making.

Is it
One photo for the wall?
A collection from your holiday?
20 from your year?
That decision- what you’re making and why - shapes everything else.

This is the part I love. Matching the mass of photos to the story that needs to be told, whether for a wall or for sharing with loved ones.

It’s the jigsaw of it.
The puzzle of what to keep and what to leave out.
The tiny, deliberate work of building a story from the (often beautiful) chaos of our lives.

It’s not always easy. It requires care.
But I think that’s what makes it worth doing.
And maybe that’s why so many people call it that bit I hate -
even when they care.
Especially when they care.