How I organized my family photos
Digitizing family photos is a huge project, and for those of us in the sandwich generation, we have the challenge of navigating between all of the physical photos and the photos we take on our phones. Where do you start?
When my mom passed away in 2018, we had to sort through everything in her house. It was fun to come across all the old pictures; like a walk back in time, dusting off memories from the past. Seriously, what were they thinking in the 70s?
I knew we had to secure these memories, so as we packed boxes, the memorabilia and photos were delivered to me for digitizing. Here’s what I had:
22 slide reels (about 2000 slides)
11, 8mm film reels (they were already put on DVD)
17 albums and 2 boxes of loose photos (a little over 5,000 photos)
8 cassette tapes with voice interviews of family members
12 binders/notebooks of published articles and journals
All the boxes arrived on my doorstep on July 27th, 2018, and I wanted to get this done as a gift for my family for Christmas. I’m not going to lie… it was overwhelming, but here is what I did:
Sorting.
I spent a couple of hours, grouping each medium together, making it easier to digitize. Any duplicates or extras were tossed.
I set aside the documents, cassette tapes, and slide reels to address once the photos were done.
I pulled all the photos out of the albums and sorted by size.
I tossed a lot. Anything that didn’t include a familiar place, was just a scenery shot, blurry pictures, or pictures that had people I didn’t (or couldn’t) recognize were tossed.
I spent many hours scanning all the photos and saving them into a single folder. Once I had everything scanned, it was time to start organizing.
Organizing.
Note: Organizing photos is a very personal thing. There is no one right way to organize them and how you organize your photos often has to do with how you want to use them.
Within the main folder, I set up a series of subfolders by family name. Our collection spanned over 150 years, and sorting by date was simply too difficult.
As I sorted I added in any details available. This took me a while and I ended up doing a couple of passes.
The entire process took me about 4 months, start to finish. While I met my goal to finish by Christmas, I learned a lot through the process that has helped me understand how to help our clients. I absolutely love being able to go back and find old photos to post, share, and print. A gift my family and I will continue to enjoy.
Are you ready to get your photos organized?
