photo storage
Why name your photos. Twenty years ago, you or your parents may have picked up photos from a local photo lab and simply written the basics on the back of the prints: the date, location, who is in the photo and what’s going on. Today, we don’t give our photos this type of attention. Instead, we may think about doing something with them only when our phones run out of memory and prompt us to make more room by exporting the photos to other storage devices. Years of this saving go by, and then we find ourselves in the unforgiving sea of unnamed images. Using metadata and a consistent file renaming pattern increases the “searchability,” of your images, says Caroline Guntur, a professional photo organizer who teaches online digital photo organizing classes. If you want to be able to quickly find your images, it’s important to start renaming your files now. Otherwise, a decade from now when you’re looking for a photo of your daughter’s first day of school to post on her graduation day, you might be wanting to pull your hair out as you try to locate it. Consistency is key. First, professional photo organizers recommend using a consistent system when it comes to renaming files. This wi...
Box up photos for safekeeping. After you have replaced the photo albums, and dated and scanned the photos, you’ll want to store the full albums in the plastic bags I mentioned earlier. Then, for added protection, place the albums in archival boxes. Using archival boxes allows for further organization, especially if you have a mountain of photos and albums. You can date the boxes to make them easily accessible the next time a curious family member wanders to the storage closet to discover his or her history.
Remove stuck photos (if you can). So how do you get these photos out of the dreaded magnetic album? First, I don’t recommend using anything resembling a knife. This practice risks further damage since just one slip could slice through an entire photo. Instead, use dental floss. Just lift one corner of your photo and gently saw the dental floss back and forth underneath until it becomes unglued. If a photo is especially difficult to peel off the sticky paper, you can use a hair dryer to heat up the glue and melt it into compliance.
Incorporate a secret drawer. A kitchen can never have too many drawers. And what better place to fit an extra drawer than inside another? This well-organized cutlery and utensil drawer makes fantastic use of space by having two separate drawers behind one drawer front. One section can be used for utensils, while the other can store cutlery. Alternatively, the second drawer is a great place to store a second set of cutlery reserved for special occasions and celebration dinners.
5. Digitize and Back Up Your printed photos, home movies, treasures and memorabilia are just as vulnerable as your digital images that haven’t been backed up. Until you digitize your physical collection, these memories could be lost through fire, flood, natural disasters, human carelessness, natural decay or an unexpected tragedy. This is why once your sorting is done, the next step is to scan all the photos — and your index cards if you want — and put the digital images in cloud storage. This is the safest place for your family’s photos, as discs and flash drives can get just as lost as the physical copies.
3. Sort Chronologically or Thematically Once you’ve completed the ABCs, you’ll want to decide if you are going to sort your pictures chronologically or by themes. If you already have a somewhat chronological system in place, look for ways to build on that. If your photos are a hot mess, try themes for easy sorting. Chronological: Keep in mind that printed photos may lack dates and details unless you or your parents took the time to jot that information on the back of photos or in albums. Create a timeline as you begin to compare pictures and time periods for information and clues. If your photos are a mess of disorganized prints with no structure, then I recommend a theme-based approach. Theme: Your photos most likely have themes already. You have photos of birthdays, vacations, weddings, graduations, babies, sports and so on. Organizing by theme has many advantages: Themes make it easier to pull together a photo album. Put an entire collection of photos on the theme into one album, such as a vacation album, or take a handful of photos from each theme for a family yearbook. Themes are easier to identify than dates. You may not be sure which year a Christmas photo was taken, bu...
2. Identify the Keepers Many professional photo organizers use a simple acronym I developed called the ABCs to organize and identify which photos to keep and which photos to toss. “A” is for “album”: These are the photos that belong in an album, and the memories you would mourn if you lost them. These are the pictures that you’ll want to digitize, back up, share and display. It doesn’t mean you’re going to put all these pictures into albums; it just means they are album-worthy. They are the best of the best! “B” is for “box”: These photos are the extras that support your best. They are the ones you aren’t ready to part with, but want to have access to at some point in the future. These photos will be archived for safekeeping but not necessarily digitized. “C” is for “can”: Yes, you can repurpose these photos — or throw them in the trash. Your collection is filled with doubles, triples and really bad photos. If your photo doesn’t fall into one of the above categories, then it’s a “C” photo. I encourage you to be brutal here and set a goal to fill a garbage can with these! “S” is for “story”: Does the photo tell a story? These pictures play a significant role because there is so...
1. Find a Workspace Find a place with sufficient lighting. You can set up a table in this area if you prefer, but I don’t recommend using your kitchen table, as this project should be spread out over several days. Also, don’t forget to be gentle and wear gloves. Your older photos may be delicate, and all your pictures are susceptible to further deterioration from the residue from your fingertips. Wear cotton gloves anytime you handle your photos.
3. Label. During the sorting process, corral photos into plastic bags, and label the bag by writing directly onto it or use a sticky note to label the bag with its category. Move these images into more permanent storage after you have gone through all your images. 4. Store. You want to use boxes that are made for photos. “The word to look for is archival,” she says. These types of boxes can hold hundreds or thousands of photos. You will want to consider the space in which you are storing your images and find archival containers that fit. You can find links to additional resources on the Association of Personal Photo Organizers site.
2. Sort. You can start sorting from any box or album. There is no need to find the beginning, Kraponick says. She recommends sorting either by chronology or by theme. Going in chronological order usually takes longer, she says, because people have to do extra research to figure out the year. “People get hung up on the dates. … Is this 1978 or 1979?” she says. “You end up looking at the clothing and the hairstyles and the buildings. You end up being a detective.” When you do it by theme, you separate the photos by occasion, such as birthday or Christmas. From there, you can sort by person or location. If you want to write on a photo, use an archival pencil so you don’t harm the photograph
Photo handling tips: Wear lint-free gloves while sorting through your images because your photos are dirtier than you think, Kraponick says. Wipe your images as you go with a lint-free cloth. For photos stuck in an album, use dental floss to lift the image from the page. You can saw back and forth a little and then use a spatula to scrape it off. If it’s really stuck, you can blow on it with a hair dryer, she says. That will loosen it some, and you can continue to work at it with the dental floss and spatula. If it’s still stuck, she recommends trying un-du, an adhesive remover.
Save Email Who, what, when and where naming approach. This naming system — who, what, when and where — has proved to be the most popular with professionals and avid renamers, says Rita Norton, a professional photo organizer. For this system, you’ll include people, event, date and location in the file’s name. Andi Willis, a professional photo organizer, highly recommends using a system that starts with the year, then month and then day. The location, event and people follow. Last, leave the sequence number, or the number automatically given to the image. An easy reference to remember this organizational tool is: YYYY-MM-DD-location-event-who-sequence number. For example, a birthday party for your mom, Susan Smith, in San Francisco on May 23 would look like this: 2017-05-23-san-francisco-birthday-party-mom-susan-smith-JPG-2839. When you are naming files, avoid special characters except for hyphens and underscores. If you don’t like the version above, you can also use a style called “camel case.” This style removes the hyphens and instead capitalizes the first letter of each word. The above file would look like this in camel case: 20170523SanFranciscoBirthdayPartyMomSusanSmithJPG-...
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