How to choose the best photos from your holiday
You come back from two weeks away with 1,500 photos and the genuine intention of doing something with them. Then the folder sits untouched for months, because going through it one picture at a time is exhausting and you keep changing your mind.
The fix is not more willpower — it is a repeatable method. Below is the approach professional photo editors use, adapted for an ordinary holiday archive, plus how to do the same thing in minutes with AI.
A 5-step method
- 1
Cull the obvious rejects first
Make one fast pass and remove only the clearly broken shots: out of focus, eyes closed, accidental, badly exposed. Do not judge quality yet — just delete the unusable. This alone often removes a third of the set.
- 2
Group near-duplicates and keep one
Holidays produce bursts: five almost-identical shots of the same viewpoint. Look at each cluster and keep the single strongest frame — sharpest, best expression, best moment. Discard the rest.
- 3
Judge by the memory, not the pixels
For what remains, ask "does this picture bring the moment back?" A slightly imperfect photo of a real moment beats a technically perfect photo of nothing. This is the step software struggles with — your judgement matters most here.
- 4
Balance the story
A good selection covers the trip: places, people, food, details, the quiet in-between moments. If you have forty sunsets and no people, trim the sunsets. Aim for variety, not just your ten best individual frames.
- 5
Set a target number and stop
Decide up front how many you want — 50 for a photo book, 20 for a slideshow — and hold to it. A finished selection of 50 beats an unfinished pile of 500. When you hit the number, you are done.
Frequently asked questions
- How many photos should I keep from one holiday?
- For a photo book, 40–80 images usually works well; for sharing, 15–30. The exact number matters less than picking a target and stopping there — an open-ended selection never gets finished.
- Should I delete the rejected photos?
- You do not have to. Keep the originals in an archive and work from a copy. Deleting is optional; the goal is a clean, small selection you actually use, not freeing up disk space.
- Can AI choose the best holiday photos for me?
- AI is very good at the mechanical steps — removing blurry shots, collapsing near-duplicate bursts, and ranking by general quality. It is weaker at "does this bring the memory back", so the best workflow is AI for the first pass, you for the final call.
- How does ShortlistBuddy help?
- ShortlistBuddy runs steps 1, 2 and 4 automatically: it scores each photo, detects series and keeps the best of each, and balances the selection, then hands you a shortlist to approve or adjust. A 1,500-photo trip becomes a reviewable shortlist in a few minutes.
Let ShortlistBuddy do the first pass — turn your holiday photos into a reviewable shortlist in minutes.
Try the demo