I somehow became the Keeper of the Photos in my family. I have pictures of my grandparents and a few of my great-grandparents, plus a ton of photos that my parents sent to my grandparents of all us kids at various stages--Dad was in the military, so they took a lot of pictures to send to the families back home.

This is how I tackled the project when I decided to get them organized. It might give you a few ideas.

Step 1. Sort. Discard all the blurry photos. Sort everything into general categories. I did Great-Grandparents, Grandparents, Mom & Dad (which included baby/child pictures of them up to their wedding pictures and also pictures of them without the kids). For myself and the 7 siblings, a pile of Family photos, plus individual piles of pictures of each sibling. That took some doing, as there were usually 2 or more kids in each shot. So Bobby got all the pictures of his birthday parties, even though there were other siblings in the pictures, for example.

Step 2. Identify. There were a lot of older pictures, like those of Mom in her teens, where I couldn't identify everyone. (My parents had died long before I started this project.) So I called the aunts and uncles on Dad's side of the family, and visited them with a ton of pictures in tow. Had some very lovely visits, ate a lot of cookies, drank gallons of tea, heard some interesting stories about Mom and Dad and Grandpa, got names for almost all the faces. For Mom's family, I had a little tea party when some older cousins came into town and we sat around the table and looked at pictures and gossiped madly.

Step 3. Decide. There were so many pictures that scanning them all would have taken forever. So I picked certain pictures to scan. All those of the grandparents and great-grandparents. Mom and Dad's wedding album. All the first day of school pictures of all the kids. One picture from each birthday. Random funny or significant pictures. Then one of my brothers scanned them--I think there were about 500. They all got put on flash drives and every sibling got one. (So we have backups out the wazzoo if we need them.)

Step 4. Preserve. I really didn't want to get rid of any of the pictures. So each sibling got their own stack of pictures--the ones that were clearly theirs, like the birthday pictures, plus a selection of group shots. Since there were usually a couple of shots of the same group, and I had duplicates of many of them (because my parents always had two copies made, one for each set of grandparents), there were enough to go around.

A couple of pictures, like the only one we have of my paternal great-grandmother, I took to a photo store and had duplicates made for all my siblings.

Then I took the pictures I liked best and make a few photo albums. Not scrap books. I bought archival quality photo albums that allowed room to write the names and dates and occasions. There's one for Mom and one for Dad and one for me and one for all the grandparents. And one with baby pictures of Mom, Dad, me and the siblings, and now all the nephews and nieces.

All the rest of the pictures are stored by category in archival boxes that shouldn't damage them.

I got a lot of the supplies from the Exposures catalog.

camlan do you hire out? I'd pay for that kind of help with mine - no joke!

I have the same project ahead of me with the Snell Family items. Not just photos but lots of paper as well. Camlan, great post and this thread is very timely.

Make sure to purchase archival quality albums!

I had many duplicates, burned one. I had tons of pictures of all the pets we have had over the years. Kept only a few of each, burned the rest. Just these 2 things really depleted my photo collection. Oh I also sorted, "vacations". kids, holidays, pets etc. My intention was/is to scan them which I haven't done but I do have neat, labeled zip lock bags all in one box of our photos.

Thanks for asking this question. I have the same project ahead of me. I think I will go the archival box route since I do not have the patience to scan or stick into albums. I did start keeping albums when I was young and I enjoy looking at them. I just don't have the space for more or, as I said, the patience.

Camlan, come on over. I'll feed you all the tea and cookies in the world if you will take this on! Congrats to you.

Camlan: you are one awesome ~ and super organized~ person! You've inspired me and I love your ideas and system!!!

I'm following your system. After I read your suggestions, I ran down to the local Dollar Tree where I picked up 10 large plastic shoe boxes, ($10) which will temporarily hold my photos as I sort through them. I also bought 2 packs of (20 total) manila file folders ($2) that I'm going to cut up into dividers for each box to categorize the pics by year and then subcategories for events, holidays and whatever.

I like your idea about scanning the best onto flash drives. I can store the master FD in our safe deposit box, I guess.
I'd like to create DVDs with special events, holidays, vacations on them vents on them and then make copies for our two kids . . . eventually. I just went back to look at my intimidatingly huge box of photos and I'm so glad that I now have a plan of action to deal with them! Thank you for taking the time to put your ideas down for me and for many of us here who are in similar situations. I really appreciate it!

Now, has anybody created their own DVD's from their scanned photos? I do want to make up some myself. I'm too frugal and too creative to have some company do it for me . . . but is it very difficult to do if you have a good photo scanner? Did you use any special program?

DLM: I totally agree with you, I know many people that would love to hire Camlan to do this for them.

Goldie: good luck with your own project. And, yes, definitely archival-quality albums and photo boxes.

Eandhl: good idea and one I'm going to use: get rid of all copies (and similar) photos right away. Thanks!

Dedtired: I'm right there with you regarding the albums. I've run out of space for more!
Lynn

I started off years ago with photo boxes. Then I realized that I couldn't flip through them and stressed if they got out of order. A couple years went by then I got busy. I got a sale on photo albums that hold 250 photos and bought about 20. I sorted the photos by year. I began at the earliest year and sorted the year out into seasons. Then I began to load. I kept duplicates together and tossed bad or blurry photos. I felt so good after one year, that I kept going. We've been married 23 years so that tells you how much work I had to do. I labeled each photo album with month/year to month/year on the inside and special notes like specific vacation photos and I put a number on the top of the binder on the outside. They are stored by number in a cabinet in my living room. Some people scrapbook, but I don't want to and have too many photos to mess with. Maybe I should have sorted by kid, but my kids are still growing and I wasn't sure how to sort them. I just wanted something that we could sit down and thumb through as a family. It DOES make it easy when I'm looking for a particular photo/s with them being labeled by year. I can go right to it.
Now, once I load my photos onto my computer, I burn them all onto a CD and label it. Then I have the photos if I want, but I don't feel like I have to print ALL of them.
I know what a job this is believe me. Good Luck with whatever you decide to do. Work on it a little at a time and plan on it taking a long time.

Reduce. In 30 years No one will want to see more then one darling picture of a 3 year old at a petting zoo. (I recently threw out 12 pictures of my kid with the same goat),

Think about the images you like to look at. Probably faces of those who you came from, not trips they took.

Thank god for digital media!

ML

Joanie, how wonderful that you finally got them all finished! Actually, I'd love to have more actual photo albums in addition to burning them onto a CD or DVD. That would be a lot of albums for me, but you've gotten me rethinking. I may put together some of the best pics into albums after I scan. Thanks!

Maddielee: that makes so much sense. I went back and spent a couple hours this morning trying to do that. What an eye-opener! Judging my pics using your criteria, I was able to throw away a lot of similar or just-not-that-memorable photos. Thanks for that advice.
Lynn

We are in the midst of scanning and saving files now. We have scanned over 2,300 thus far with 1,000 or so to go. I am naming each image as we scan with name, place and date.

I save a copy to my computer, to 2 USB flash drives, SkyDrive and Dropbox. After we complete everything, I will save all files to three additional USB drives and give one to each of our kids. We also will buy a digital photo frame with enough capacity to hold all files. We plan to throw away all the original photo prints.

Wow, John_wc, and I thought I had a lot of pics! I love how organized you are with saving them via several methods instead of just one or two. Covering all bases, so to speak. Are the SkyDrive and DropBox online storage sites? Are they similar to PhotoBucket, which is the one I use for pics I might want to post here on GW. Thanks for this new information to look into!
Lynn

This post was edited by lynninnewmexico on Tue, Apr 16, 13 at 17:19

SkyDrive and DropBox are Cloud services so to speak. SkyDrive is Microsoft and you can access through your Outlook mail account or directly and you get 7GB of free storage.

DropBox offers 2GB free storage and has a different approach. You send photos you have scanned to the DropBox folder on your computer and those files will automatically sync to the DropBox website. You have to download and install a file to use DropBox.

Since we will be throwing away the hard copy prints, I don't believe we can have too many backups. You just never know when it comes to technology.

BTW, yes you can use PhotoBucket as well. Their limit is also 2GB.

I find the scanner takes far too long and is laborious. Settled on taking camera shots while sitting with old photos, then importing. Much faster and transfer is so darn quick. A simple photo software can add info. Camera shots also give you a far better resolution.

Am not fond of plastic storage as it can interact with the original photos. Paper boxes or folders with sides work well and can include large photos.

If you scan them, you can then edit and modify colors and tones to your liking. Then burn them to a disc and label them. I did some that way and, after editing, they looked sooo much better.

Thanks, John! I'm definitely going to look into getting SkyDrive as I totally agree with you about not having too many backups.

Technicolor: yes, those plastic boxes are not the best for long-time photo storage, that's for sure.

Yaya: I agree! Editing those old photos first makes such a huge difference. I brighten, crop and take away the yellow wherever needed, and it makes them even more special.