4 Easy Ways to Organize Your Vacation Photos

From the first day of camp to the Fourth of July parade, you’ve snapped quite a few pictures this summer. We’ve found four apps that will help you organize and share those images with speed and efficiency. So you can put the summer of 2015 in the books — so to speak.

Google Photos

What it is: The latest iteration of photo storage from Google replaces Google+.

How it works: The new app offers real time photo backup of what you shoot on your phone plus unlimited storage of high quality photos and videos. Once uploaded, you can search your photos by facial recognition or keywords with uncanny accuracy. It recognized our 8-year old from birth to her most recent birthday and never confused her face with that of her look-alike little sister. And rest assured, even though Google is in the search business, your photos are secure and private.

Favorite feature: “The Assistant” automatically groups shots based on date and creates gifs, photo albums, and collages.

Cost: Unlimited storage of compressed images; 15 Gb for full-sized images. 100 GB is $2/month; 1TB is $10/month.

LifeCake

What it is: Recently acquired by Canon, Lifecake is a private platform for storing, organizing, and sharing your family memories in the cloud. Think interactive timeline meets journal. Fear not: the founders (vets of Skype and Yahoo) promise the camera giant won’t change their commitment to your privacy or limit the devices you can use to capture photos. Keep clicking away on your phone.

How it works: After initializing the app and entering basic info for your kids (name and birthday), LifeCake lets you organize all of your digital photos and videos into a shareable timeline. You can add stories or captions to each image, create slideshows set to music from your device, and invite friends and family members to privately share in the fun.

Favorite feature: Make a hardcover photo book from the website for $50.

Cost: Download 10 GB for free; unlimited storage is $4.99/month or $35.99/year.

Kidpost

What it is: If you document your family life via social media, but have grandparents or loved ones who still can’t figure out how to use a VCR, this is the app for you.

How it works: After signing up, sync Kidpost to your social accounts. Next, on the Kidspot website add the email addresses of the people you want to share your memories with. Every day Kidpost will scan the images you post to Facebook, Instagram, Flickr or Twitter, and if you have added #kidpost to the post your friends and family will receive an email digest of the images.

Favorite feature: Want to be less obvious about using Kidpost? Customize your hashtag. #Goodtimes. #Summerof2015. Whatever works for you.

Cost: Free for the first month. After that $3/month or $30/year.

Carousel

What it is: DropBox’s answer to photo storage and sharing. If you use DropBox for other documents you will feel right at home.

How it works: Carousel syncs with your DropBox account and your phone, automatically backing up all of your photos you shoot on the cloud. Photos and videos are organized chronologically, but you can decide what to hide from your homepage. Create albums to share or post on your social accounts.

Favorite feature: Take a trip down memory lane with Flashback. It organizes and presents images from that very week in years past.

Cost: 3 GB of storage, free.

This article originally appeared on Cozi

This article was written by Lindsey Gladstone for Cozi, a Time Inc. company. Cozi is the leading family organizing app that makes it simple to keep track of everyone’s schedules, shopping lists and to dos. Information is updated in real time and shared with each member of the family, so everyone is always on the same page. Get the Cozi app (it’s free!) at cozi.com or search for Cozi in your favorite app store.

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