Photo dump ideas for when your camera roll looks empty

Everyday dumps, when nothing in particular happened

The hardest to start and the most reliable once you do, because ordinary weeks contain far more material than they appear to.

A week in my life. One photo a day for seven days. The constraint does the work, and the result reads as a week rather than seven unrelated photos.

The coffee dump. Every cup for a month, different places, different hands. Repetition with variation is the oldest set structure there is.

What I ate. Not restaurants only. Toast at the kitchen table in morning light beats most restaurant plates, because the light is better and nobody is watching.

My walk. The same route at different times. A tree, a door, a corner, the same view at dusk and at nine in the morning.

Things on my desk. Objects, close, in window light. A dump needs texture shots between the faces, and this is where they come from.

Getting ready. Mirror, shoes on the floor, half-finished drink, the leaving-the-house photo. A sequence with its order built in.

Sunday. One day, start to finish, no events. Quietly the most effective one, because everybody recognises their own version of it.

Seasonal dumps, which write themselves

A season is a ready-made window, and the material differs enough month to month that the sets do not repeat.

Month dumps. Everything worth keeping from one month, posted in the first days of the next. It becomes a habit, and the archive it builds is worth having.

First warm day. The one where everybody sits outside. Bright clothes, drinks on a wall, long early evening shadows.

Autumn. Leaves underfoot, a coat, steam off a cup, low light through a window. The most forgiving light of the four seasons.

Winter indoors. Lamps, blankets, condensation on glass. Shoot toward the lamp rather than under it and the photos stop looking like a dark room.

Christmas and new year. Out of focus lights behind, hands holding things, the table before and after. Soft focus on the lights gives colour without a good camera.

Summer evening. The last hour of light, which flatters everything. See golden hour photos.

End of year recap. Twelve photos, one per month, the one dump where strict structure beats casualness.

Travel and weekend dumps

The commonest kind and the easiest to get wrong, because travel produces hundreds of buildings and almost no people.

City weekend. One building, one street, one meal, two of the people you were with, one detail. That ratio stops it becoming an estate agent's brochure.

Beach days. Sand, feet, a towel, water, something to eat. Shoot early or late, since midday at the beach is the worst light of the day.

Road trip. The windscreen, a petrol station at night, the passenger asleep, the landscape from a moving car. Motion blur is a feature here.

Airport and transit. Photogenic and underused. Windows, queues, the view down, a coffee at an unreasonable hour.

Where I stayed. A room, unmade, in morning light. One of the strongest single photos in most travel dumps.

The food only. A whole trip as meals in order. The sequence tells you where you were without a single landmark photo.

A walk somewhere new. No plan, no landmarks, just what you passed. The least performative travel dump and often the best.

Occasion dumps

When something did happen the difficulty inverts: too many photos, all of the same eight people in the same room.

Birthday. Cut to one frame per moment. Cake, the room before anybody arrives, the table afterwards, two group shots at most.

Night out. Flash, taxis, the queue, shoes, the end-of-night photo that is objectively terrible and must be included. See flash photography tips.

Concert or festival. Stage lights from a distance, the crowd from inside it, wristbands, the walk home. Most concert photos are bad, so two is plenty.

Wedding guest. Not the couple, who have a photographer. Your table, your shoes, the light in the room, your friends laughing.

Graduation. The gown, the family, the specific expression of relief. One formal photo carries a whole dump of casual ones.

Dinner party at home. The table being laid, hands passing things, the wreckage at the end. Shoot from standing.

A new flat. Empty rooms first, then the same rooms with things in them. The before and after is the story.

Christmas at home. Whoever cooked, in the kitchen, before anybody sits down.

Thirty ideas in one table

Shooting with a dump in mind

The difference between people who post good dumps and people who have nothing to post is not the camera. One of them took a photograph of the table.

Take the boring photo. The room, the street sign, the receipt, the shoes by the door. These are the connective tissue of a set, and nobody regrets them later.

Shoot five kinds of frame. A face, a wide, a detail, an object and one with movement in it. Any set containing all five feels like a set. A set of twelve faces does not.

Shoot in the shape you will post. Setting the camera to 4:5 means no crop decision later, and that is where framing gets lost. If you must crop, see how to crop a photo for Instagram.

Do not delete as you go. The photo that looks like a mistake tonight reads as real in three weeks. Cut at selection time.

Unify the colour at the end. One look across the set, applied after you neutralise any bad white balance, does more for coherence than editing each photo well.

Ours, so weigh it accordingly: ShutterAI is a camera app we are building with Photo Dump curation, which groups a window of your camera roll and proposes a set, plus captions written in your own voice. It is not released yet, it comes to iPhone this fall, free to start, and there is a waitlist. Until then, the selection method in how to pick photos for a photo dump does the same job by hand.