Tackle and Protect Your Photos
How many pictures do you have?
On your phone? On your computer? In photo albums?
What about your family photo albums, your childhood, your parents, your grandparents?
We didn’t used to have a camera at our fingertips. Photos were sacred and pictures were taken at special occasions; not at every occasion, every walk, every time your dog does something adorable (which I know is always!)
My parents have 70+ years of photos in their home. Some are in photo albums, some are in boxes and bins, and some are on the computer. My job was to digitize the photos that were never digital - which, of course, is the majority of them.
Here’s how I tackled this project.
Organize the physical collection
The first step was to organize the physical collection. This included:
sorting by year (generally)
discarding duplicates or poor quality photos
Luckily, the photos were already organized by year. Basically when the photos came into the house, they were labeled with event, year, month, and put in boxes. Even though the boxes sat in the basement for 20 years, they were pretty much ready to be scanned.
If they are not already organized, I encourage taking as much time as you need here. Here are some tips to help overcome the overwhelm in this step.
Make educational guesses about time frame
Decide how detailed you really want to be. You might decide that you don’t care so much about the year or season, but the event is more important, or the person who is the focus of the pictures is more important. Organize that way. There is no right or wrong way to do this, just what works for you!
Scan
This part can take some time, but if you have a good photo scanner, it can be really easy. Especially if you spent time sorting the physical collection well.
Organize the digital library
This is the kind of project, where the more time you put in at the beginning, the easier it will be as you move through the process.
There are a couple of things you want to think about when it comes to organizing the digital files of your photos.
Consistent file names (if you have a good photo scanner, this part will be done for you when you scan!)
Do you want to be able to easily share the files?
There are so many places you can store the photos - on your desktop, Google photos, Dropbox, Microsoft OneNote, etc.. (some will cost money for storage, and with photos, you can use up your storage pretty quickly.
The good thing is that nowadays, most of these platforms make it really easy to share folders, individual folders, etc. - but remember, one person will have to be designated the owner of the folders
I also would recommend scrolling through the photos once they are uploaded and sorted and continue to delete any ones you may have missed in the physical pile. Sometimes, it might be easier to scan a larger pile that has been minimally sorted through, scan them, and then delete in the digital collection.
Share
Now that your photos are digitized, and organized, it’s time to share them! Don’t just send them to anyone and everyone, but share them with family and friends who are in the photos with you. If you went far back and scanned photos from past generations, be sure to share them with people who you think would value them the most.
Keep them organized
The final step, as is with any organizing project, is to keep up the good work you just did. The great part is that you don’t need to go back and organize the photos that are already done. But, to prevent having to do this in the future - make sure your phone and/or digital camera is synced with the program you decided to store the photos in. Make it a habit to delete poor photos or duplicates regularly, and put events into their own folders.
You’ve got the tools, now go tackle those photos!