How the Photo Chaos Score works
The Photo Chaos Score is a Tidy Haus self-assessment. It takes your own answers and shows two separate things: how much friction is in your photo library (a score from 0 to 100), and roughly how much time that friction costs you in a year. Neither number is a diagnosis, and nothing you enter is stored or shared.
What goes into the score. Eleven questions, nine of them scored. Each scored answer carries 0 to 10 points. Add them up and divide by 90, and you have your score out of 100. The “where do you mostly look” question lets you pick several places: each extra place adds 2 points, up to a maximum of 10, because a library split across devices is harder to search than one that isn't. The last two questions — which trouble sounds most like you, and what would matter most if it were organized — are not scored. They choose the suggestion you get at the end.
| Band | What it means |
|---|---|
| 0–24 | Photos are under control |
| 25–49 | Photo friction is building |
| 50–74 | Your library needs a reset |
| 75–100 | Photo chaos is taking over |
| What you told us | Adds to the score | Adds time |
|---|---|---|
| How many photos and video files | Yes | No |
| How many places they live | Yes | No |
| Where you look and use them | Yes | No |
| How long a search takes | Yes | Yes |
| How often you search | Yes | Yes |
| Getting pulled into scrolling | Yes | Yes |
| Near-duplicates | Yes | No |
| Albums, folders or tags | Yes | No |
| If your phone were lost today | Yes | No |
How the hours are worked out. Your own numbers only: the minutes it takes you to find one photo (the middle of the range you picked) multiplied by how many times a week you look, plus 10 minutes for each time scrolling pulls you away, multiplied by 52 weeks. Taking, storing and viewing photos are not counted — only the hunting and the drift. The 10 minutes per sidetracked scroll is a Tidy Haus planning assumption, not a study figure.
What the research supports. Five studies stand behind the pattern the score measures. None of them converts your answers into personal hours.
- Whittaker, Bergman & Clough, Easy on that trigger dad: a study of long term family photo retrieval, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2009 — families lose photos to poor finding rather than poor storage. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0218-7
- Kirk, Sellen, Rother & Wood, Understanding Photowork, CHI 2006 — the work of curating and printing, and where it breaks down. https://doi.org/10.1145/1124772.1124885
- Rodden & Wood, How do people manage their digital photographs?, CHI 2003 — large collections left unordered, with finding left to the last moment. https://doi.org/10.1145/642611.642682
- Zürn, Broekhuijsen, van Gennip, Bakker, Zijlema & van den Hoven, Stimulating Photo Curation on Smartphones, CHIIR 2019 — curation on phones needs prompting; it rarely happens on its own. https://doi.org/10.1145/3295750.3298947
- Sillence, Dawson, Brown, McKellar & Neave, Digital hoarding and personal use of digital data, Human–Computer Interaction, 2023 — accumulation and the difficulty of letting go. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2293001
What happens with your answers. Nothing is stored or shared. Your results come straight to your inbox with your full breakdown and a $50 credit, code CLUTTER50, which takes $50 off your first two hours — the $280 two-hour start — when your proposal arrives. Book a free discovery call and we'll tell you honestly whether Tidy Haus is the right help.