Here’s a stat that will blow your mind: did you know that humanity took approximately 1.9 trillion photos in 2024?

 That’s 5.3 billion per day.

61,400 every single second!

According to recent studies, the average smartphone user has around 2,800 photos sitting in their camera roll right now (I just opened mine right now for checking, I have 8107 xD), and give the sheer quantity, it is only natural that most of which will never be seen again after the first week, let alone printed!

If we had to print 5,3 billion photos a day, we would run out of trees on Earth within few months!

In our gigantic galleries, travel photos are often the worst offenders.

After all it is only normal coming back from a place you might never see again in your life, and findinf yourself with hundreds, or even thousands of shots. There is almost no price to pay to take an additional shot, so we are all “why not”, “just in case”, “just one more”…until our phones are full!

Landscapes, food, sunsets, that one perfect street corner you stumbled on at 7am…

Photos normally accumulate, all in there, buried under each other, slowly disappearing into the archive! Also for the most methodic people that try to sort them out regularly (like me!), the task becomes more and more daunting each time!

And then…there are those rare occasions where you would like to print some of them!

Last year, I found myself wanting to gift Isa (my girlfriend) a photobook of our travels (and in 7 years together, we’ve been in so many places, that coming down to a normal number of pictures to print, was a Macchiavellian task!

Yet, printing forced me to make decisions!

And while I was skimming galleries and galleries in search for the best pictures of our journeys, I realized that having to take a decision — literally that act of choosing — is what turned memories into vivid experiences!

In this article, I will tell you how I navigated the chaos and chose those images, and how you can do it too!

Here’s how to make it well. Let’s dive right in! 🙂

From Phone to Wall:

Your Guide to Choosing the Right Photos 🙂

1. Every Photo Worth Printing

Needs to Tell a Story

This is the most important filter, and it should come first.

A technically perfect photo of a famous landmark means almost nothing on its own.

You can find a better version of that shot on Google Images in thirty seconds….

What makes a travel photo worth printing is the story it carries: the context, the moment, the feeling, the people, the expressions!

Did something happen right before or after that shot?

Is there a person in the frame who matters to you?

Does looking at it bring something back immediately? A smell, a laughter, a conversation, a moment of pure disorientation or joy in a new place? 🙂

If the answer is yes, it’s a strong contender.

If you look at a photo and feel nothing, leave it on the phone, no matter how technically beautiful and well-taken it is.

This is also why photos with people in them tend to age better than pure landscapes. Ten years from now, you won’t remember exactly how that mountain looked.

But you’ll remember exactly who you were standing next to when you took that shot!

Personally, in doing my photobook, I ended (after deleting and deleting), with 208 photos (I wasn’t able to bring myself to less ahah), and almost all of them were about me or Isa and our families and friends…after all, being in the photo is part of “proofing” ourselves we did something, it’s a memory worth more than the place itself!

2. Then Apply the Quality Filter:

Resolution, Light and Focus!

Once you’ve identified photos with a story behind them, apply a basic quality filter.

Look for sharp focus, decent exposure, and reasonable composition.

A slightly underexposed photo can often be recovered in editing.

A blurry one instead (particularly if the blur is on the subject rather than the background),  usually can’t, and will look terrible at any significant print size! (on phones photos look better than they are, thanks to the small screen size!).

This matters especially if you’re planning to display photos at home.

Travel collages, pegged-polaroids and picture tiles in different shapes and formats, can all create genuinely beautiful wall displays, but only if the source images hold up at larger dimensions.

A photo that looks fine on a phone screen can fall apart quickly when printed at 30x40cm.

As a rule of thumb: if you’re unsure whether a photo is sharp enough, zoom in to 100% on screen before committing to printing it.

What you see at full zoom is roughly what you’ll get on the wall 🙂

3. Follow Your Emotional Connection,

Not Just the Aesthetics!

Some of the best photos to print aren’t necessarily the most beautiful ones.

They’re the candid ones.

The slightly chaotic ones.

The ones where the light was wrong but the moment was right xD

Those could be someone laughing at the wrong second, a meal that looked terrible but tasted like the best thing you ever ate (or even more terrible like the coffee above ahah), a blurry shot of a night market at 11pm that somehow captures exactly how that evening felt 😉

Those are the photos that actually represent what a trip was.

Not the curated highlights, but what it really felt like to be there.

So when you’re going through your camera roll, don’t just look for the shots you’d post on Instagram. Look for the ones that make you feel something specific — not just “this is pretty” but “I remember exactly where I was and how I felt in that moment.”

That distinction is what separates a photo worth framing from one worth forgetting.

4. Diversify Your Selection

Once you have a shortlist, look at it as a whole and ask: does this tell the full story of the trip?

A good selection covers different dimensions of the experience, not just landmarks and landscapes, but people, food, street life, night shots, transportation, small details.

The hotel room with the view you didn’t expect. The market stall.

The taxi driver who gave you a two-hour history lesson.

The breakfast you had every morning for a week.

Variety also matters for display purposes.

A wall covered in nothing but horizontal landscape shots at the same scale becomes wallpaper pretty fast.

Mix orientations, sizes, and subjects and the result is a display that actually rewards looking at it.

If you’re putting together a photobook, and if you haven’t tried it yet, our guide on how to make the perfect travel photobook is a good place to start 😉

The diversity becomes even more important, because the sequence and variation are what make it readable as a story rather than just a collection of shots 🙂

5. What Doesn’t Make the Cut?

Keep It Safe on the Cloud

Not everything that doesn’t get printed needs to be deleted…. actually far from it!

The photos that don’t make the wall or the album still have value: they’re your raw archive, your reference points, the shots you might revisit years later when you’re trying to remember a specific street name or a restaurant that no longer exists!

Keep them organized and backed up.

Cloud storage platforms like Google Photos or iCloud give you essentially unlimited space with solid search tools, you can find “beach photos from 2023” in seconds without scrolling through thousands of images manually 🙂

Then with AI-search, today is becoming easier than ever to sort them out and find what you’re looking for!

The rule is simple: print the best, store everything else!

Don’t delete. Storage is cheap. Memory is not 😉

Conclusions 🙂

And here we are at the end! 🙂

Story first, quality second, emotional connection third: diversify your selection, and back up everything else. Simple framework, but trust me, it works magic and will save you loooot of time and headaches! 😀

Now before going I would like to ask you:

do you still actually print photos at all, or has everything stayed digital? xD

Which one you like to print most?

Drop your answer in the comments, we are always curious to see how other travelers handle this!

My photobook gift went surprisingly great, although I took a full day to put all pictures into place ahah But Isa loved it and that is all that matters to me:)

And if you want to go further with your travel memories, check out our full guide on making the perfect travel photobook. See you in the next one! 🙂