Somebody else picks the photographs

The problem is not storage. It is selection.

Nobody's photographs are lost. They are all right there, backed up twice, perfectly safe and completely unlooked-at. What is missing is the half-day of concentrated, slightly painful work that turns four thousand frames into one hundred and sixty — and that half-day never becomes the most urgent thing in anyone's week.

A photo curation service is simply somebody doing that work on your behalf. You hand over the whole set, without pre-selecting, and a curator goes through every frame: throwing out the near-duplicates, keeping the one where the light was right, noticing the picture of your father laughing that you skimmed past because it is slightly out of focus. Then a designer lays those frames out as a book with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Why sending everything works better than helping

Almost everyone's instinct is to be helpful: to whittle nine hundred pictures down to a hundred and fifty favourites before sending them. It feels considerate. It is the single thing that most damages the finished album, for three reasons.

• Favourites are not the same as an album. People shortlist the pictures they look best in. A book needs the wide establishing shot nobody is in, the empty room before the guests arrive, the hands, the shoes, the weather.
• Rhythm needs spare material. A good spread is often one loud picture and one quiet one. Pre-selected sets are all loud, and a book of nothing but highlights reads flat by page twenty.
• You are too close to it. You remember what happened just outside the frame, which makes you keep pictures that only work if you were there. A curator only sees what a reader will see.

So: send the lot. If there are pictures you never want to see again, say which and they are gone. Everything else is our problem.

What a curator actually does with your files