Keep Receipts and Work Photos Out of Family Albums

How do you keep receipts on your iPhone so that at the end of the month you don’t have to hunt for them among family photos? Imagine Sofia. She renovates apartments, and her phone is a work tool. In a day it collects fifty shots: a wall before, a wall after, a crack in a corner, a tile code, a receipt from the hardware store, a screenshot of a chat with a client, a photo of a menu in a cafe that needs translating.

And between them, her son on a bike. Dinner with her mother. A sunset through the car window.

On Saturday evening Sofia wants to show a friend photos from her son’s birthday. And she scrolls past three hundred photos of other people’s bathrooms.

Why work and personal are always mixed

The gallery does not know what work is and what life is. To it, everything is just photos by date. So work and personal are mixed forever. A selfie pops up in the report for the accountant, a water meter reading in the family album.

And when at the end of the month you need to gather all the receipts, the hunt begins. Where is that receipt for glue? Wednesday, I think. Or Thursday.

Three doors for three lives

In Spohad every thing has its own door.

• Memories is for life. Your son, your mother, sunsets, holidays. What will be dear to you in twenty years.
• Recall is for tasks. Receipts, work photos, screenshots, shots to translate. What you need now, what you will have to return to, and can then let go.
• The Vault is for the private, what nobody should see.

In the feed it is one move. A receipt: swipe right, to Recall. Son on a bike: left, to Memories. And inside Recall you can make your own folders: “Receipts,” “Garden Street site,” “To translate.” How such shelf-folders work in full is in How to organize photos in folders.

Where do you keep receipts for an expense report?

In one folder. At the end of the month Sofia opens “Receipts” in Recall. All the month’s receipts, as a feed or a grid, one after another. No selfies, no sunsets.

Each can get a name (“glue, 14 euros”) and a tag “March,” and search finds them by those words in seconds. How that works is in How to find a photo on your iPhone fast.

Recall folders are real folders, visible in the Files app. From there they are easy to send to the accountant or open on a computer.

What do you do with photos to translate?

There is one more category that always gets lost. A photo of a sign, an instruction, a letter in a foreign language. You snapped it to translate, and forgot where it is.

Those shots have their own place too: a “To translate” folder in Recall. Each frame there can get a showing rhythm, say once a week, and Spohad will keep bringing it back into the feed until you deal with it. Translated? Swipe to the Trash. More about rhythms in Screenshots and saved videos on iPhone: how to go back.

Private things stay behind a lock

Sofia also has things nobody should see: scans of documents, medical certificates, personal photos. She can use a free Vault folder in Files, which Spohad locks with Face ID but does not encrypt, or the encrypted Vault inside the app with Pro. The encrypted Vault uses cryptography built into iOS: on this iPhone it opens with Face ID, Touch ID or the iPhone passcode; on a new device only her Vault code works, and there is no back door.

Quick guide: how to separate work and personal photos

1. In Recall, make folders for tasks: “Receipts,” “Sites,” “To translate.”
2. Scroll the feed: work goes right, to Recall; life goes left, to Memories.
3. With a slow swipe, choose a specific folder.
4. Give receipts a name and a month tag, and search will find them later.
5. For shots “for later,” set a showing rhythm.
6. Send private things to the Vault. And press Save.

Saturday evening

On Saturday Sofia opens Memories. Her son on a bike, the birthday, her mother. Not a single bathroom.

The work has not gone anywhere. It lies behind its own door and waits for Monday. But it no longer gets in the way of life. Try sorting your own feed on the home page.