Photo albums, stacks of photos, scrapbooks, photos scattered across your phone or computer, piled in drawers. We all have mounds of photos laying around our house that were handed down from your parents, grandparents and friends, we don’t want to get rid of these memories, but the photos are getting ruined and taking up lots of space. What do I do with these photos? Many of us have struggled with the best way to hang onto the photos without losing those precious memories. Hopefully this article will help you come up with a solution to store and keep these precious memories for many more years, without taking up all that space on the bookshelves or in the garage. Getting several old Photo albums recently with hundreds of family photos recently got be thinking about how am I going to store these photos; in the end I decided to scan all the photos and organize them onto folders and place them on my external hard drive, this way they take up less room and I will always have access to them, without having to pull them out of the back of the closest or attic.
Setting up a Plan/Getting Starting
The first step in this photo organization project is to know what kinds of photos you are looking to organize. Do you just have hundreds of photos your parents took from your child hood, or are you the family photographer always taking the photos? Everybody has photos floating around and need some kind of organization. Typically the easiest way to organize photos is by year or even subject. For myself, I have two organization methods I have combined together to organize my photos. First I would organize the photos by date, if I knew what that was. If I didn't know the dates, or the photos didn't have specific dates (such as portraits from family members) I would sort by subject.
Once you have determined your sorting method, you need to gather all your photos. If you still use photo albums, you want to go ahead and collect them all and get them in one spot and organize them the best way you can depending on how you are going to organize the photos on your computer, in my case that was by years (Sometimes easier said than done, you want to try and get accurate dates). If you just have boxes of loose photos go ahead and sort them by like photos (photos from the same event) and then by year. This will probably be the most time consuming part of the project if the photos are loose. You want to go ahead and date the photos and note what the event or special occasion was; I just used a pen and wrote on the back of the photo the date, event and who’s in the photo. Don’t be afraid to call in help with this, especially if the photos are before your time.
If all your photos are on your computer, you can skip straight to Sorting photos, most of the hard work as already been accomplished (sorting the photos can be the most time consuming). Now most likely you have photos on your phone, or tablet as well that you need to get onto your computer. Like with most things are the numerous ways to get your photos from your phone or tablet to your computer. Some popular cloud photo storage and sharing programs: Carousel (Dropbox), Google Drive, OneDrive, Shoebox, Shutterfly, Photobucket, Flickr. We will not discuss the pros and cons of these programs in this article. But there are things you need to consider when choosing a program: capability on your devices, your familiarity with the software and storage allowed in the software in order to get your photos from your phone to your computer. I personally use Dropbox and GoogleDrive, they both work with my Iphone, Ipad and on my computer, gives me lots of storage options and the ability to automatically back up my photos from my phone.
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Once you have gathered your mountain of photos, you need to make sure you have enough storage on your computer or external storage device to store all these photos. This can be difficult to determine. Before you go out and buy a new hard drive, determine how you want to store your photos; do you want them on CD’s, desktop, SD cards, external hard drive. Roughly 500 scanned photos will fit on 1GB of storage. If all your photos are on your phone, or already on your computer then there sizes will vary and require more or less storage. If the photos are already on your computer, just click on the folder the photos are in and determine the size of the folder. One last tip in chooses a storage device, is to choose one that will allow for storage of future photos. How inconvenient would it be if your storage device was full and you couldn’t add photos from this year’s birthday celebrations? My recommendation would be an external hard drive with at least 1TB of storage. For the extra few bucks I would consider a wireless external hard drive, so that you do not have to move it around the house to access your photos.
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Scanning Photos
Now what can be a time consuming process, but probably one of the easier steps, scanning the photos and getting them onto the computer. Chances are you already have a scanner lying around your own house, or maybe you can borrow one from a friend. If not depending on the amount of photos you can either take your photos to a store that has photo services (Walmart, Walgreens, Sam’s club) or if you have a lot of photos buy a cheap scanner. This is probably the easier option. This doesn’t have to be completed in one day. Take your time.
This is probably the best time to go ahead and rename the photos and depending on your scanner and capabilities, you might also start the sorting process now. Now determining what names to use or how to name your files can be difficult, you want something that is descriptive, yet you don’t want a paragraph as a name. There are three essentials parts to the name that should be included no matter how you name your photos. 1. Date 2.Description 3. Sequence number.
- Date: you want to include the date, no matter what. This helps you sort the photos later for organization and helps keep the photos in chronological order. Having the full date is awesome, but at a minimum you want the year. It is best to always start with the year. (Ex. 1989-12-25). If for some reason you do know the month or the day, replace the day or month with an X (1989-12-XX or 1989-XX-XX). This will help later in sorting the files.
- Description: this is usually a short title outlining what is happening in the photo. This can be something as simple as mom’s birthday or vacation. It can also be longer: Christmas at grandma’s or vacation to Hawaii.
- With modern computer software, you have the ability to add comments, author, tags and even ratings to your photos. Chances are you don’t need to use all these options, the comments ability will become your friend. This is where you can get real descriptive about the photo and what is going on in the photo and who is in the photo, remember your grandchild’s probably won’t know the people in the photo or the significance of the photo. In this comments section, you want to at least include; what is going on (ex. Birthday, Christmas, etc.), who’s in the photo and where the photo was taken (grandpa’s house).
- Sequence number: the odds of having just one photo from an event is very slim, chances are you will have multiple photos and unfortunately you can only use a filename once, so by using a sequence number you can have several photos with the same filename. This will also tell you how many photos you have from your first birthday if you ever want to know.
| How to name your photos |
Note: when going through the photos, do you really need 10 photos of your mom cutting your birthday cake? Consider cutting back on the duplicate photos.
A Filename for a photo you just scanned should look something like 1989-11-06.kennybirth.001.jpeg or 1990-12-XX.christmas.002.jpeg.
| Screenshot of a folder containing some of my photos |
Sorting Photos/Saving Photos
So the time consuming part of preserving your family’s memories is over, you are now tasked with sorting the photos. If your scanner didn’t give you an option to sort your photos into various folders during scanning, the step is a matter of copying files from one folder to another. Once again there are many different ways to do this. The simplest way to sort your photos is just to create one folder for each year. Just copy the photos into the correct year and you are done. You can go one step further and create subfolders by month or specific events. (Ex. In a folder labeled 1989 you can create subfolders for each month of the year or a folder for each specific event that happened in the year (Birthday, Holidays, Vacation, etc.).
Tip: It would be helpful and make this process easier if you sorted your pictures before you scanned them.
| Screenshot showing how I organized my folders. |
I have folders for each year I have photos and then sub-folders for events throughout the year. Now you may be asking yourself, I have photos of my kids that aren’t from a birthday or Christmas and I’m not sure of the exact date or even year. To solve this problem you can create a folder for your kids, your dog, yourself or your parents and place all those odd photos in there. You can see from my folders, I have a mix of folders listed as years and some with just names.
Once all your photos are sorted make sure you have saved them to your storage device, if you are going to be storing the photos on CDs/DVDs make sure you create labels with a description of what is on each CD. My personal recommendation is to use an external hard-drive or a cloud storage program. You can get external hard-drives with wifi capabilities, so you can access your photos from anywhere.
Tip
Do not try to combine your photos with your wifes photos before you met. Trying to combine them can be a very difficult task given the fact that both families probably kept track of their photos differently.
Sharing Photos
The best part of this project is sharing all your family history. There are many ways share your photos with your family and friends; if you don’t know how to share your photos with your friends, you probably still have your photos sitting in the photo album on your table and haven’t started this fun project. (Check out our article on prepping your photos for social media, to get your photos ready). Remember #throwbackthursday and #flashbackfriday. Have fun with it.
Now you can go collect your 1000s of photos laying in drawers, scrapbooks, on CD and organize them into one place. Comment and share how you save your family photos.
