With the advent of digital photography and great cell phone cameras, printed pictures have become…
Photo Organizing Project
One major project on my to do list is to organize all of my photos, update the albums they are in and produce printed photo books of all the digital images we have. Sound like a lot? I’d say so. But with all these snow we’ve been getting this year, it’s a perfect indoor project.
This is one of those organization goals we only hope to accomplish.
If I were organized enough, I’d have my pictures in albums or If I could find time, I’d sort them all by year or When I have a free weekend, I’ll order some photo books of our pictures.
Sound like something you wish you could do?
Well I’m here to take on this massive photo organizing project once and for all and you can some along with me.
The Plan to Once and For All Organize my Photos
These steps to finally get my photo under control and in albums {printed or digital books} are based on 1. What I’m working with and 2. My photo organizing to do list.
First, here is what I’m working with:
- Eleven photo albums that date from before I was born {old family photos} to about 2008, when I got a digital camera. These albums are the binder kind with the self adhesive pages and are all organized by year and month. Yay for being somewhat organized! Clearly I had control of this in my younger years. Even if one of them was a puffy fabric covered album by aunt gave me and clearly I was into the navy, hunter green and maroon colors of the early 90’s 🙂 I put the painters tape on so I could see how much was in each binder.
However, as I suspected, a lot of the self adhesive pages are yellowing, the adhesive is wearing off and in general this isn’t a great way to store photos for the long term. Since I already have the binders, I’d like to minimize costs and reuse them somehow.
- I also have two containers and several file folders full of loose photos, some of which may be doubles of what is already in the albums, but many of which need to be dated and sorted to then be able to go into albums.
For my digital photos, what I already have is:
- Two hundred folders in iPhoto, somewhat organized by year. These include all of the photos I take for the blog and photos I take just for everyday memories.
- Several memory cards from the past, all filled with photos from about six years worth of events.
- Email messages with photos that people have sent to me. They need to get into one storage location.
And now, here is what I plan to do to finally tackle this massive photo organizing project, broken down in two parts. One for my printed photos and one for all my digital ones.
Printed Photos
1. Gather in one place all of the loose photos I have. This means pictures people send us of their children, some I’ve had printed that never made it into an album and old family photos that never got into an album in the first place.
2. Identify dates for all of those photos and organize them by year and month. This will probably take the longest of all the steps – someone bring me wine!
3. Select a new storage system for the photos I do have in albums. Order any necessary items. What I’m thinking for this is to order some of these and these photo archive pages, which are Polypropylene Photo Album Pages that fit into 3-ring binders. That way I can save money on buying new binders and the new pages will hold more or as many as I have in my current binders.
4. Apply the new storage system. i.e. put photos into the new storage system
What this will entail is, after I file and organize all of the loose photos I have, many of which fit in between all of these binders {I don’t know how they escaped at the time}, I’ll start transferring all of the photos in the current self adhesive binders into the new plastic sleeves. And then I can still keep them in the binders, whether I recover them or not. Or maybe get new binders in the long run?
Digital Photos
Now for the to do list for all of the digital photos.
- Collect in one place all of the digital photos I have. This includes all the pictures people have emailed me that they took at our wedding, parties, and all of the pictures I have from my phone, cameras and old memory cards.
- Sort all of the digital photos in order by year, month and event.
- Identify a software to use to create printed photo albums.
- Create printed photo albums from all of our digital photos that have never seen the light of day. Have albums made and display proudly in our home.
Lastly, relax and hope it hasn’t taken me three years to do all of the above.
As a profressional photographer, I can offer the following advice:
1 – avoid the magnetic/sticky photo albums. They will destroy your photos.
2 – a like a photo box where you can stack/line up photos and pass them around. yes, it’s harder to keep them “in order” that way, but if you’re careful to label the backs (with an archival pen) with the month/year, it’s easy to sort them back into a reasonable order.
3 – snapfish and shutterfly both have great systems for uploading photos and creating photo albums. I like to create an “annual” for every year with the most important/fun/interesting photos from every year.
4 – if you want a set of 4×6 prints from your general digital photos/camera photos, Costco is the way to go. An annual membership is $50 and will more than pay for itself if you’re going to print a bunch of family photos for the aforementioned box (#2).
5 – buy a backup hard drive (something for $100 will give you a ton of space) and back up all of your digital photos. Hard drive failure or computer failure or phone failure is a given. It’s not “if”, but “when”. Backing up your family photos is CRUCIAL.
As a professional I always recommend that people PRINT photos as well as sharing them on digital media and BACK UP everything!!!!
Kara, this is awesome! Thanks for all the tips. I do have an external hard drive, so I’ve got that covered. The good thing is I have all of the past photos printed already but will have to spend a lot of time on the “annual” albums. I actually didn’t consider editing a year’s worth of photos down, but I think that will help me to only include the best of the best. I’m excited about that project.
Thanks again for the info and feel free to leave tips anytime! P.S. Annie above had some questions, if you wanted to leave a comment and make suggestions for her 🙂
Thank you for this post. I am also planning to organize all my photos– family photos that go way back to the 50’s, all the photos of my kids in the 70’s, and everything up to today. I’d like to digitize all the old printed photos but am overwhelmed by the amount and scope of the project. Obviously, the first thing is to determine which to digitize and which to file in a box or album. But then, how to convert to digital? Should I purchase a quality scanner and do it myself? Or send out and have them done by Costco or some such place? Then what? What software and storage to use to create albums or photo stories? I’d appreciate any advice and recommendations any one can give. Thanks again for a great post.
Annie
Hi Annie,
Yes, that is a large project you have on your hands, but it can definitely be done. Break it up into manageable pieces and soon you’ll be making progress. At first I would say to put the ones you already have printed in archival quality albums. If you also want to convert these to digital, start searching for scanners that might work for you. Maybe enlist the help of a teenager or friend to make the work go faster? You can always look for local services to do this kind of work, but I’m sure you will pay a pretty penny for it too.
You can keep the digital images on your own computer in folders, and get an external hard drive to back up the computer (and photos on it) on a regular basis.
Kara recommended some software and I’ve also heard of Blurb. Do some searching online to see what meets your needs. Do you want it free? Compatible with your computer? Easy to use? Search around, I’m sure you’ll find something and keep us posted on how it works!
Hey Annie! Jessica pointed out your question and I thought I’d drop in my two pennies. 🙂
If you have a lot of prints, you can get good quality scans from any flatbed scanner on the market. I have a $120 Canon scanner that hooks up via a USB cable and does a fantastic job.
If you have a lot of negatives or slides or if you have some prints that you want professional quality retouched/fixed images, I cannot recommend Scan Cafe strongly enough. I’m not in the least affiliated with them; I just use them for my own work. Last year I sent them over 2000 family slides to scan in and the quality was awesome for a very reasonable price. (scancafe.com)
Hope that helps! 🙂