The Memory Curator with Allison Lee

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The Memory Curator with Allison Lee

The Memory Curator is an online course for busy mums/moms who want to organise their digital photos

01/11/2026

Every week someone asks me...

"Why do I have HEIC photos?”

An HEIC photo is the file format that Apple defaults to taking. It stands for High Efficiency Image Capture.

HEIC isn't a bad photo format. In fact, Apple chose it because it stores your photos more efficiently.

The problem is that the rest of the world hasn't fully caught up yet.

You may run into problems when:

- creating photobooks
- sharing photos with people who don't use Apple
- opening photos on some Windows computers

For most people, I currently recommend changing your iPhone camera to take photos as JPEG instead. It simply avoids a lot of unnecessary frustration.

Will that recommendation change one day? Probably.

But for now, I'd rather you spend your time enjoying your photos than troubleshooting file formats.

Comment **SOFTWARE** and I'll send you the link to my free workshop on using software to quickly sort out decades of digital photos.

31/10/2026

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in Google Photos is confusing **Delete** with **Free up space**.

They sound similar, but they do very different things.

If Backup is turned on, tapping **Delete** in the Google Photos app usually deletes the photo from both Google Photos **and** your phone.

If your goal is simply to make room on your phone **without losing your photos**, use **Free up space** instead. It removes photos that have already been backed up from your phone, while keeping them in your Google Photos library.

Understanding this one difference can save you from accidentally deleting memories you wanted to keep.

Comment **SOFTWARE** and I'll send you the link to my free workshop on using software to quickly sort out decades of digital photos.

30/10/2026

Most people get paralysed when they see that little “iCloud storge is full” message pop up!

”What do I do?”

Here is a quick guide:

If you're about to travel or have an important event coming up, I recommend buying more storage straight away. The last thing you want is your photos to stop backing up when you're making new memories. Usually this cost is only $5 - $10 for the month. Well worth it.

The important thing to know is that you don't have to commit to a bigger iCloud plan forever. You can upgrade for just a month, get through your trip or special event, then decide what to do next.

Once the immediate pressure is gone, don't stop there.

If you want to remove the threat of running out of storage all together, here is what I recommend.

Request a copy of your iCloud Photos from Apple, organise everything into one locally organised Master Photo Collection with all your other photos, then remove the rubbish, duplicates and blurry photos.

If you still love using iCloud Photos, you can upload your organised collection back into iCloud.

Your goal shouldn't be to own more cloud storage.

Your goal should be to own an organised photo collection you control where you can find what you want when you want it.

Comment **SOFTWARE** and I'll send you the link to my free workshop that explains the system I teach.

29/10/2026

This is the tool that makes organising decades of photos possible.

Whether you have 20,000 photos or 900,000, Lightroom Classic is designed to help you sort out a huge mess of photos.

It can automatically sort your photos into folders, find duplicates, rename files, let you search by date, location or person, and keep your entire collection organised in one place.

Instead of spending months doing everything by hand, the software does the heavy lifting so you can focus on the photos and memories that matter most.

That's why I teach it.

If your photo collection feels impossible to tackle, I'd love to show you how it works. Comment software for the link to register

28/10/2026

Q: Why can't I create a folder on my external hard drive on my Mac?

A: Because the drive is likely formatted for Windows. I find that quite a few external hard drives that say they work on a Mac require you to download a driver. The easier solution is to just reformat it to EXFAT. Be sure that there is nothing on the drive though as formatting it will erase everything.

Comment SOFTWARE and I'll send you the link to my free workshop. Start building your own organised collection.

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story. I would love to help you too!

27/10/2026

One of the most common questions I get is:

**"If I add a photo to an album in iCloud Photos, have I created a duplicate?"**

The answer is **no**.

An album in iCloud Photos is simply a way of organising your photos. Think of it like adding a bookmark. The photo still exists only once in your library.

You can add the same photo to multiple albums without creating extra copies or using more storage.

The only time you create another copy is if you deliberately duplicate the photo or save a new edited version.

One thing to be aware of is that if you ever decide to move away from iCloud Photos, extracting your albums intact can be very difficult. Exporting the photos is one thing. Keeping all of your albums exactly as you've created them is much harder.

Albums are wonderful for viewing and grouping photos, but they aren't a long-term organisational system.

If you'd like to learn how to organise your photos in a way that's easy to search, back up and move between systems, comment **SOFTWARE** and I'll send you the link to my free workshop.

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story. I would love to help you too!

26/10/2026

What is the #1 thing most people don’t know about Apple Photos? (tip: save this for later if you have an Apple device)

It is that when you use the Apple Photos App, your photos are stored in a proprietary Apple file called the Photos Library.

This file is NOT a folder. It cannot be opened like a regular folder in Finder. It can only be opened by the Photos App.

Most people expect that they can access their photos somewhere outside of the Photos App. That would make sense right? You can see individual files that are documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. So why can’t you see your individual jpegs or image files?

That is a question for Apple, but in my experience with 100s of students, this becomes really problematic when you want to store your individual digital photos on an external hard drive, or organise them into folders, or use a software like Lightroom Classic. With your photos stored in the Photos App (and thus in a Photos Library file) you can’t do any of the above.

In addition, if you have old Photos Libraries that didn’t get properly upgraded, they can be impossible to open with the current iOS version you have. So your precious photos are forever locked into this Photos Library file.

I spend a significant amount of time helping people figure out how to extract their photos from their Apple devices, in particular the Apple Photos App. It can be done and there are about 4 different ways to do it depending on your situation.

1. Download from icloud

1. Request your photos back from Apple
2. Export from the Photos App
3. Use a secret backdoor method to break into the Library

Apple is brilliant at a lot of things, but can make organising your photos really complicated.

If you would love to know how to organise your photo outside of the Apple ecosystem but still use your iPhone, comment SOFTWARE and I will send you the link to my free workshop

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story. I would love to help you too!

25/10/2026

Love to make photobooks? So do I!

Here are my 3 favourite tools for making the process simpler, repeatable and fast.

Canva: Here I create projects that have multiple uses. One project can be printed as a photobook, downloaded as a video and saved as a pdf.

Lightroom Classic: I keep my family photo collection in Lightroom. So when I have a big project, I usually will make the photobook inside Lightroom so I can work with my photos without moving them or uploading them to a book making site.

Snapfish: All my family photobooks are printed with Snapfish at a family-friendly pricepoint, so I don't stress about damage.

Making photobooks becomes infinitely more fun and enjoyable once you have your photos organised. If a messy photo collection is standing in your way, comment SOFTWARE and I will send you the link to my free workshop on how you can get 1000s of photos organised fast.

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story. I would love to help you too!

24/10/2026

One of the biggest myths about organising photos is that you have to fix every mistake you've made in the past before you can move forward.

You don't.

Many of my students have tried to organise their photos several times over the years. In the process they've accidentally created thousands of duplicates, copied folders between computers and hard drives, and ended up feeling even more overwhelmed.

That's exactly why I teach using software. It does so much of the heavy lifting for you.

I also love the last part of this student's message. Once the photos became organised, it wasn't just her who benefited. Her whole family started looking through old memories and rediscovering moments they hadn't seen in years.

That's what an organised photo collection is really for.

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story.

Comment SOFTWARE and I will send you the link to my free workshop so you can learn exactly what Julie did to finally get her photos organised.

I would love to help you too!

23/10/2026

Most people think the quickest way to free up space on their phone is to start deleting photos.

If you use Google Photos, there's a much safer option.

The **Free up space** feature removes photos from your phone **only after they've been safely backed up to Google Photos**. It can free up gigabytes of storage in just a few taps without you having to scroll through thousands of photos deciding what to keep.

But I find most of my students don’t know it is an option!

If you are new here, I am Allison and I help people get their photos organised so they can protect their memories and use them to tell their family's story. I would love to help you too!

Comment SOFTWARE and I will sent you the link to my free workshop on how to organise your photos fast.

Address

Sydney, NSW

Website

http://www.memorycurator.com/

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