In an article by Andy Zahn addressing how to clean up and organize your photos, he describes perfectly our dilemma:
Most people enjoy capturing photos, but few take any pleasure in the labor-intensive task of getting them into any kind of order on computers or other devices. However, just as spring cleaning your house or emptying the McDonald’s wrappers out of your footwell can be a rewarding and cathartic experience — as well as a necessary one — so too can be cleaning up the similarly messy pile of photos stuffed haphazardly on your PC.
Or are they all on your computer? Where are your photos stored (yes, back to your childhood days)? Are they all digitized? Are they on external hard drives – multiple ones and stored …uh, somewhere? Do the hard drives still work? With your present computer?
Or are they burned into multiple DVDs? Or do you have a drawer full of SD cards mixed with paper clips, pencils and other detritus (as Andy describes it)?
Or do you just have them in the phone or camera that was used to capture them? Or, as I have been told by some folks, they have old computers they are keeping just because of the huge amount of photos on them.
Or are they not even digitized and just piled in boxes or drawers (like my mom did up until her last few years). Are they just “everywhere”?
Most likely, if you are in my age range, your childhood photos were few and far between and certainly not digitized.
As he walked people through organizing in his article, he made an astute observation – the crux of the problem, if you will. He outlined putting digital photos in folders and organizing by the year, etc. Then he hit the nail on the head – “The downside is that this method does take a large commitment of time if you have many thousands of unsorted photos. However, I’ve found that this is time well spent myself, and I wish I’d been doing it this way since I received my first digital camera.”
‘Many thousands’? Judging by his picture, he is half my age and has only lived in a digital age. He didn’t have to have all his childhood and early marriage and later family photos digitized. And I have taken a whole lot more photos in my lifetime than he can imagine, I suspect.
OK, true confession time. Thankfully, I got a great deal from a mobile scanning company who was trying to get started in business many years ago – they scanned all my boxes of photos from childhood forward. At least I had learned of a digital software program for photo storage and my newly digitized photos all got stuffed in there. Along with all the digital photos I took thereafter.
Thanks to merging the backups a couple of times as I switched computers over the years – here comes my confession – there are 256,000+ images and videos in that software today. Lots of duplicates, some triplicates, some tagged, mostly not, and, like Andy, I wish I’d been doing it in an organized way since I first started putting my digitized photos in the program….and kept it up!
Nope, Candy had not inherited her “family history stuff” yet, so they were not included. And yes, I am slowly getting those items digitized today. Thankfully, FOREVER (my all-in-one photo place) has a great digitization department. And now that I have learned about their permanent storage (my life + 100 years) which includes them managing and migrating to new formats over that time, I am a much happier camper.
The good news? The digital software that I used “way back in the beginning” to store my photos was purchased by FOREVER and has been updated and is a product they continue to use and support. Hurray!
The bad news? 256,000 photos not fully curated, or organized well, or tagged sufficiently by me. Sigh.
My plan – I don’t want ALL those photos preserved beyond my lifetime. Lots of them were of friends and clients for whom I did projects, many are just not memory-worthy, and I really only want to save the photos that are important or significant for sharing the stories of my life.
So I have transferred to my FOREVER permanent storage account (digitally) the photos I want to save. Nope, not finished yet. Yep, working on it a bit at a time.
And I am very mindful of needing to curate, tag and add info to the photos I am bringing into my permanent storage. But happily, the organization structure and retrieval tools in the permanent storage are excellent – so much easier to navigate than the software program with 256,000+.
So, what is my takeaway?
I think the big question for us to ask someone about their photos is “Are they accessible?” Can you really find that photo you want when you want it? Or find photos around a particular time period or involving a special event? And such photos you most likely (if you are my age) have forgotten?
Another danger zone is storing all your digital photos with a company who may decide they no longer want to keep the photos (like Costco and other vendors have done), or you want to unsubscribe to their services for some other reason. Or you miss paying the subscription for a time.
It is my passion to help people (like me) who need a system and some support in getting a plan in place – I have learned a ton as I have traveled this path. And I have mastered the basic tools of FOREVER that are our biggest helpers. I may be just a bit ahead of you, but I am ready to cheer you on and share whatever tips and helps I can.
Just hit “reply” and let me know how I can help!
