The first episode of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (Netflix) addresses this. (I have not watched it yet.)

Good luck, I have drawers full of pictures that I need to do something with.

Last but not least, where exactly should I store the final set of images? Should I scan everything and get rid of the paper completely?

I was just talking about his with a friend recently. She decided that she would keep the original photos, and let her kids dispose of them if they want when she's gone.

I did a quick organizing of thousands of fotos last spring before we moved. They had been "stored" for years in brown grocery bags by year.

I didn't have time to really get into it, and DH has said he plans to scan them now that he's retired, but I did go to Michaels and bought probably a dozen foto boxes and organized them as best I could by year, using large index cards inside to mark as needed, as well as marking the outside.

I left any negatives I found with each bunch at DH's request. He's the "photographer" and he can pitch them if he wants when he scans.

One day...ahem....I plan to put a box/chest together for each child with pictures and any childhood memorabilia I still have.

I got mine out of a big box and put them all in photo boxes by year. I tried to put them in date order within the year, but that got to be soooo boring. I also have one box by Event. I'm not even sure why I did that. I tossed all dupes and negatives. Good luck.

When I retired I did the same as dedtired, went thru many years of photos from vacations especially and threw out a lot, and I emphasize a LOT. Only difference is that I only did mine by year.

I also have been updating albums of the more important things in archival album pages. I am very behind with this, but it’s more my winter project. I need another album and more pages before I continue. If interested in a nice album, I order from Exposures.

I also made a photo album for each of our boys, who didn’t really have a lot of photos of themselves as babies and young boys. They nearly cried when I gave it to them. I of course kept some for us, but only a few. I figured their own kids needed these more than we did. Our DD scrapbooked for many years and had kept several of her own photos, so I know she has many of herself. I’m still thinking of doing an album for her though.

I recently took 5 boxes of photos and sorted into decades as best as I could. It’s impossible for me to put them in date order. I tossed most of the pictures that didn’t have people in them. I plan to scan all the photos and make several backups to be stored in a safe place. I will then make a disc for each of my children, and then toss the actual photo. I didn’t keep the negatives. This is a daunting task so I’m anxious to hear what others are doing.

Thanks everyone-I am going to tackle these one box at a time and just do the best I can! Nate, like you there's no way I can put things in date/year order, it's all too much of a jumble.

Eventually I'll have to dig into my mother in law's albums as well. She was the self-ordained family archivist so there are so many, many, MANY images of people nobody knows; distant relatives, friends of friends of friends, people she went to high school with, and she graduated in 1941! I kept all the albums when she went into assisted living and have mined them the past 2 Christmases for much appreciated gifts (photo calendar, album and framed prints).

Serious question, can you pay someone to do this? I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to look at all those pictures of missing people in my life.

My photos are all in chronological order - unfortunately some are in those awful photo albums with adhesive pages and I need to remove all the photos first. I'd love to hire my very own intern to scan everything for me.

Maire, you might just remove the top plastic sheet and use your phone to take a picture of the photo. My iPhone take some pretty good pics. I think that photos from the adhesive albums are kind of gummy and won’t scan well.

Thanks Natesg. It's not something that I'm eager to do but I've set up a work table in my guest room so one of these days I'll begin. I think I need a good snow day.....and a hot cocoa. A friend also told me that there is an app on iPhones that allows you to take a shot of the entire page and then you separate the individual photos.

I looked into service that will do the scanning for you if you send them. That was as far as I got as far as paying for support with it. Lots of ideas online . . . Plus folks blogging and sharing their tips and experiences. I just can't seem to carve out time though, I'm still trying to keep up with just daily household tasks. By the time I retire my body and memory may be too shot!

Since I do scrapbooking I had to go thru boxes and boxes of photos to get them organized. What I ended up doing was first sort them by subject-vacation spot, holiday, event, and the random snapshots I categorized by the subject person-one for each of my kids, my DH, me, grandparents, cousins and friends.

I threw out dozens of photos-scenery ones mainly, unless it was something special, but how many photos of deer in a field or the Hoover Dam do you need? I also tossed duplicate/similar photos. For example, we had a bunch of pictures of the kids frolicking in the pool. But half a dozen of them were so similar I just picked out the best ones and tossed the rest.

I did keep candid photos, those are the most fun.

After categorizing I put them into acid free photo boxes with dividers-I labeled the dividers and the outside of each box so I could tell what they were without having to open them and go thru all the photos again.

Each time I would scrapbook a photo I scanned it so I would have extra copies for anyone who wanted one. I also scanned the backs of photos if they were written on. With some family members gone, it's a sweet way to remember them by their handwriting. Also-if you can, be sure to write the subject and a date if you can remember it. Later on, no one will know who that baby in a crib is if there were 3 babies in the family. We learned that the hard way when my Grandmother passed away-no one knew who was who!

What's your end game? You took and or collected these photos, WHY? If you want them scrap booked--then you best get started. Chronological order is the most usual way. Then there are specialty books, i.e. heritage/grand children...My mother has them all. Me I keep mine in files I add to or not on my computer. I have them where I can actually find them, look at them, they don't fade or get dog eared. The printed photos I have in books and photo boxes in the basement....take up space and cause dusting. When I have to hunt a pic down for what ever reason I end up taking a picture of it or scanning it to send off--and add it to my computer files.

“A friend also told me that there is an app on iPhones that allows you to take a shot of the entire page and then you separate the individual photos.”

An app that does this is Photomyne. It works surprisingly well. We used it when making name tags for a high school reunion. You take a picture of the year book page with your phone (or iPad) and Photomyne does it’s magic, separating all the pics for you.

Thanks Maddielee - I couldn't remember the name of that app.

I think the solution that works best for you depends on your volume and how you want to use them. I would never take a photo of a photo in order to archive it-- the quality is soooo compromised... I suppose if you just want to look back on them, it could be fine but if you wanted to print them, or use them in any way in the future, you'd want a higher resolution photo. I scanned both my photos and my negatives.

There are a number of products that help with tagging and retrieval-- for instance, I have a photo of my great grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, my sister and her daughter. If I archived this in a folder by year, 10 yr from now, I'd have to remember when. If I archived it in a folder of photos of my great grandmother, it wouldn't show up in a search of photos for my mom. Tagging allows you to identify the photo with each person, the year, the holiday and any other special terms.

I know there are many programs that provide this capability. I used to use ACDsee but it looks like it is no longer available. I have also used Lightroom and it provides this capability (as well as a number of other features to edit/enhance photos). Lightroom also lets you leverage the metadata stored with each photo (depending on your camera, it could include date, location and a variety of other info about the camera and conditions).

The power of tagging is huge-- especially if you want to return to USE these photos for videos, books, etc. BTW I worked on a project with the MET --- obviously on a much larger scale-- but they too used hierarchical tagging for their images.

The amount of time/effort really does depend on the end game IMHO. I love the ready access I have to my digital pictures. They serve for me the end game you described. Printing them isn't a real concern for me. And yet one does want options. My boss puts most of his pics from his phone on Facebook, then deletes. What he has found is the resolution on those pics then renders them pretty worthless for any other application. Working on Graduation type displays made him realize his mistake. I asked because my mom's end game was to celebrate each event. Tell the story of each event and have it for future generations....The time and money she has spent on this is no small thing. But they are beautiful. Now she prays and worries if anyone will keep them and pass them on when she dies.