I’ve been (recently) taking my little Scan-a-thon farther, and scanning in all of my photos.
It’s not really that I want to get rid of ALL of my photos per se, but I wanted to keep a digital copy (just in case.. fire and water damage, you know), and I wanted to only keep the photographs that mean the most to me.
I also wanted to make sure I got the old photos in there before they faded away in time.
I decided to take the Wave approach, by sorting them in what I ended up calling waves with a focused goal in mind at each wave.
Wave #1: Sort & Destroy the duplicates
(I am such a geek…. did you catch that? All your base are belong to us.)
This was… not such a bad task.
I spent a lot of time reminiscing, showing BF pictures of me as a baby and a little girl and so on. It was kind of fun.
I sorted them with only this criteria in mind: Group together & get rid of the duplicates.
I had a LOT of duplicate photos. This was back in the day before digital cameras, so when we printed photos, we printed 3 sets of each photo roll.
What a headache.
Once I was done, I had trimmed down the stack almost by 35%.
Wave #2: Sort into major categories with a rough timeline
This was a bit trickier for my mind to wrap around. I wanted to sort them in a way that it would make sense to me (or in an album) and in some sort of chronological order.
I thought about it, and decided on sorting them by:
Dates (Not exact dates, more like “Around 5 years old”, “High School”, “College”
Events (Birthdays, Christmases, Vacations)
Then within each category of “College + Birthdays”, I arranged the photos so that they were sorted by each birthday.
Wave #3: Start scanning & as you’re doing it, toss the uglies
I scanned them all in. Mass scanning.
Sat in front of my scanner, popped in some addictive Law and Order: Criminal Intent and scanned 4000 photos.
I haven’t gone through THOSE scans yet, but at least I have them.
I scanned 4 or 5 photos per round, and since they were already sorted by Date and Events from Wave #2, I won’t have to hunt and peck for similar photographs.
This was decidedly the most boring part of the task, but I was just NOT willing to fork over $200 to pay someone else to do it for me.
HALE NO! Fugg that. I be scanning them myself, thankyouverymuch.
Ahem.
As I was scanning, I also re-evaluated the photos after they were scanned, and started chopping down the pile by another 30% to have a “final” batch of photos that I am going to keep physical copies of.
Anything of me as a kid from the age of 10 and below was an automatic keep.
Any older, and it was a bit easier to keep just 6 photos of my 16th birthday instead of 25.
Wave #4: Find the right photo albums
This was the step that was the hardest for me.
To find out how many photo albums you need, you need to count your photographs.
But count them by Date & Event!!!
You DO NOT want to run into a situation where you put in your 15th birthday, and you just have 3 photos left over that you CANNOT toss, that will have to go into another photo album and leave blank spots all over the place.
I wanted a cute photo album (silk cover), with a lot of space, and with acid-free plastic pockets.
I was hemming and hawing over the idea of scrapbooks but decided they were too much work and would cost me a fortune in the end.
My other option was to buy those sticky plastic flap photo albums that you pull over the photos like plastic wrap after you arrange them, because it’s a lot easier to arrange photos that are portrait style (upright) instead of forcing them into landscape style (horizontal) pockets.
But can I find these easily? Not really. So I was stuck at this level for a while.
Wave #5: Arranging the Photos & Making Notes
I had 2000 photos in the end, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but is a huge amount for me especially with how much I got rid of in the end.
I sorted them into piles that roughly ended up being:
– Before I was born
– When I was born until the age of 7
– Age of 7 to end of Grade 8
– High school
– College
– After college (not many here, they’re all digitized now)I grouped events together (birthdays and vacations), and since I had counted the number of photos within each category, I could easily group together those piles and not have any spill over into another album.
I arranged the photos with some of them portrait style beside landscape styles on the same page, and tried to do it in chronological order of how it would have happened at that event.
I also made detailed notes in shorthand on the sides to help me jog my memories before I get too old and the memories are long gone!
Have you done anything similar?
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I scanned some old photos when I went back to my dad's home town in Malaysia. I didn't scan all of them because there were about 20-30 albums (!!) but just selected the ones I liked. It ended up being too much but I did find some gems.
I was just thinking: Unless stored in a fireproof safe, wouldn't a fire/flood destroy either your computer or external hard drive containing your scanned photos anyway? But otherwise this is a great idea; I envy your organizational skills!
I remember I had some digital photos of my favourite band on my computer which I hadn't backed up and my entire computer stopped working probably due to a virus (blue screen of death!) and it was so sad!
I have tons of photos on cd that I'd like to organize somehow. Possibly learn to zip all of them onto a USB (if it fits) or buy an external HD. You've sold me on the Western Digital passport- they're so compact!
That’s a good point. Maybe I should store one in the bank or something.
I really don’t want to lose these photos
Brilliant post, oddly enough my to do list this weekend includes sorting through & getting rid of old photos!!! If I post about it I'll link to you since this is a good post!
I personally do not like photo albums. My reasons are that they are bulky and over time the pictures keep disappearing (i.e. someone takes it out to get a copy, or look at it, or whatever) which leaves holes in the album. If you have gone through all of the work of scanning them already then I would suggest uploading them into a photo-book site like Shutterfly or Kodak and making a book of them. It is easy to do, the finished product is beautiful, and it is really cost effective. My three hundred pictures from France cost me $80 to print and for the album, when I made the book for my mom with even more pictures the book cost $60 (with shipping).
I took on this challenge and scanned thousands of family photos and then subsequently organized them into many (too many) scrapbooks. I regret the scrapbooks because they are big and bulky and take up space and if I had to do it again would just put the photos into photo safe boxes. Actually, I wonder why I kept all the original photos since I now have digital copies, but it seems somehow wrong to throw away the original. 🙂
i wish i did that while i lived at home. my mom would have my grammar school grad pics interspersed with baby pics and it drove me nuts! she would say that she gave away a duplicate photo and it freed up spots for newer photos. i have a feeling a lot of old photos were lost this way. but yeah people shouldn't feel bad for throwing out pictures that don't remind you of anything. especially if you already have 10 pictures of the same person from that same time period. i've thrown out a lot of teen photos!
Ahhh! My problem is not taking enough pictures of my life. I must fix this before I grow old and have no pictures to look back on. =[
I really don't want to resort to looking on facebook at the age of 60 (if it still exists) just to find pictures of myself and my friends haha
It's my 2010 resolution to scan about 400-500 photos of the time when I backpacked through Europe. I've basically procrastinated on this job since 2003… oops.
What type of photo album did you end up deciding to go with in Wave #4?
I got 2 from Pepper Pot, and 2 from Chapters (simple, colourful stripes and dots)
Hey! Currently doing this too – but I am just scanning scanning even though it is time-consuming… shwew!!
Zellers has teh photo albums with the sticky top sheet. I bought one for storing notecards/letters that are too large to stick in a photo album with the pockets, but that I didn't want to just throw away.
They definintely aren't silk though! Maybe try somewhere like Henry's or Black's?
I did something similar back when I lived at home. I went through and pulled pictures from my mom's albums and made my own mini album of me growing up. At some point I tossed uglies and duplicates but that's as far as I got.
I have just done this to all the pictures from pre-1980's and that was even before I was born. Making my way down to my pictures will be tough and I think that's something that I will tackle after I graduate. But, it sure takes a whole bunch of time.
What type of scanner do you have? This is a project I've needed to do for a while now, but I feel that my scanner isn't up for the task (bad scanner…!)
HP Multi-Function Fax 🙂 Full disclosure, I got it for free when I reviewed it.
You can choose any scanner really… your scanner should be perfectly fine for the job. It may be a bit slow but it works, right?
I've never done anything to that scale, but I am inspired to do something similar. I have been a hoarder of paraphernilia during my relationship with BF and I wanted to make a scrap book. I'm talking about roses, balloons, cards, movie tickets, etc. No used napkins, strands of hair or anything creepy. LOL. I don't know how I'm going to come around to it, but sometime soon.
Yes, I have been working on this — bits at a time. I have done it in a similar way to what you’ve described, except that being 50-something, I have a lot more ‘after college’ type photos. I did it roughly by decade and put them in big envelopes in a big box in the attic. I have done all the ones of my parents, grandparents and all of their respective photo albums first because of my interest in genealogy and wanting to be able to easily share photos. I’ve not solved the photo album problem yet, either. I don’t think the adhesive backed, plastic covered ones are a great idea. If you should ever want to remove the photos, they may well not come loose. I’ve not tossed the ‘uglies’ so much as any that are just scenery (I’m bad about holiday scenery) or of people I don’t have (or want) in my life anymore. I’m thinking about doing the pictures in a homemade album that resembles those of my parents and grandparents. They have leather covers and black construction paper sheets bound together with ribbons or laces. The photos are stuck in with those glue on corner thingys. You are right that it will take ages. The problem is that I’ve gone through any number of pre-digital cameras and my photos aren’t a consistent size. Part of me thinks they might be better off in smaller envelopes in a shoe box…