Category: Getting Started

A client recently told me she didn’t need to do anything with her physical photo collection because her best prints were all organized in albums already. From an organizational and enjoyment standpoint, that’s fantastic! But from a preservation standpoint, it could be disastrous.

Choosing your favorite shots and arranging them in albums or scrapbooks is a really fun way to enjoy your photos. Plus, having a curated collection is a wonderful legacy for future generations of family members. And, beautiful photo albums can be stored on open bookshelves or on a coffee table so all can enjoy, rather than being crammed into bins tucked away in a closet.

All of this is great if you’ve chosen albums and scrapbook materials that are archival quality, or if the photos in the albums are duplicates and therefore disposable. Chances are, though, you probably have a “magnetic” photo album in your midst, or even a much older album, that contains some original photos.

If this is the case, you will want to prioritize these photos in your preservation efforts. Why? Because photos degrade over time anyway, but when they are exposed to certain chemicals, the degradation is accelerated. 

Take, for instance, the so-called magnetic albums. Those are those sticky cardboard pages with a plastic sheet that peeled back so you could insert your photos or other memorabilia. After arranging everything just so, you would smooth the sheet over the items and, like magic, everything stayed in place. (Don’t get me started on how hard it was to get the plastic wrinkle-free…!)

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The thing is, the cardboard in those albums would give off peroxides that caused yellowing, and the adhesive and the plastic sheets were acidic and caused further damage to the items in the album. You can see an example of this in two albums from my own collection: the one with the photo of me (above) is in an album I put together in the ‘80s. You can also see some mildew stains on the inside front cover. The album below, featuring our kitty Appaloosa, was an album from the ‘90s. The yellowing is quite extensive on all of the pages in both these albums.

To further complicate things, the sticky material that holds the photos in place can develop a death-grip on the photos so that removing them without further damage becomes really challenging.

But it’s not just magnetic albums to watch out for. Many other non-archival materials used in scrapbooking can cause dire consequences. The photos in this album from the early 1900s were glued in, and as you can see, the glue has created yellow spots on the photos. So not only will it be difficult if not impossible to remove the photos without damaging them, the photos will need to be scanned and digitally retouched to try to return them to their original glory.

If you’re looking for a good place to start with your photos, take a look at the albums in your collection. Chances are, these are the best photos in the bunch – that’s why they were chosen for the album – so you won’t need to decide what to keep or toss, and you’ll be preserving the cream of the crop before they have a chance to degrade. 

And in the future, be sure to choose albums and storage containers rated as “archival quality” for your original photos, or, better yet, get extra prints made of your favorite shots and use those in any album you like! For instance, maybe I’ll finally get around to adding some photos to this beautiful album my friend brought back from Florence, Italy in the 1980s!

I was going through some photos today that I had gathered for a photo organizing presentation back in February in Stockholm (remember when we used to be able to gather in one room?? Or travel overseas, for that matter?!!). I wanted to share one of them here to illustrate one of the criteria for deciding which photos to keep and which to toss.

In general, we know that it’s best to toss photos that aren’t the best quality – blurry, dark, random, etc. But here’s an example of a blurry photo that I will keep. Why? Because sometimes a photo of lesser quality still tells a story, or it may be the only photo you have of a person or event and even though it’s sub par, it’s better than no photo at all.

In the case of this photo, I was studying in Leningrad, USSR for a semester and I had purchased a new camera to take with me. Back in the olden days, it was always recommended to shoot and develop a roll of film with a new camera to ensure everything was working properly, but I didn’t have time to do that before I left.

Lo and behold, I became the living example for why that recommendation was a good idea. Every shot I took was out of focus, and because I wasn’t able to develop the film until I got home four months later, I had no idea the camera was malfunctioning.

So, I will always keep these “imperfect” photos as a reminder of my time in Russia, and I have come to appreciate how the images, like my memories of the time I spent there, are soft and nebulous. But I will want to be sure to keep this information with these photos so that years from now, if someone were to come across them and wonder why they were in the collection, they would understand the story behind them.

Just something to keep in mind as you’re sorting through your own photos, deciding what to keep or toss, or if you’re wondering why those before you chose to hang onto less-than-perfect photographs!

Have you had a chance to delve into your photo collection yet? Any pleasant surprises? If you’re still needing a little motivation, here’s another thing to remember: technology is your friend!

You don’t have to be a computer genius to benefit from all the help technology can offer. I’m working on my digital photo collection at the same time I’m working on my physical collection (glutton for punishment, I know, but I love it!), and I’m reminded every day of all the cool things technology can do for me when it comes to dealing with photos.

One of my biggest setbacks with digital photo collections in times past was that I would have to back up my large digital photo libraries all over the place because we didn’t have the luxury of giant hard drives back in Ye Olde Days of digital photography. 

So, when it was time to merge all of those photos into one Master Library, that meant – you guessed it – duplicates! 57,902 duplicates, to be exact, and those are just exact duplicates with the exact same file names. 

If I were to go through my 118,630 digital photos and compare each one to see if I had more than one of each image, it would literally take me until the end of time. Or, more likely, until my eyes fell out. 

Instead, I can let the computer do what it does best: compute!! I can run a deduplication program like PhotoSweeper and have it compare all the images in my photo library and return the ones it thinks are duplicates. I press start, walk away (because with a library this big, it takes a little while), and voila! The computer tells me which photos to trash. All I had to do was click a button.

But deduplicating isn’t the only fun tech you can enjoy when working on your photos. There are countless programs that help you spruce up your pictures to give them new life and help them shine. From simple filters in programs like Instagram to more robust programs like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom Classic, there are options for people of every tech comfort level. And the programs are improving all the time!

For instance, here is a small photo restoration I did with Photoshop 13 years ago for a photo album I was making for my father-in-law. Nowadays there are programs that can do this kind of work for you. The quality may not be quite what it would be if it was done “by hand,” but if you’re not interested in doing it yourself or having someone do it for you, this is always an option.

And let’s not forget other fantastic things a computer can do with your photos, such as facial recognition and location services! With little effort on your part, you can easily find every photo of Great-grandma Betty or every photo taken with a location-enabled camera on your trips to Sweden. 😉

What are your favorite technology tools?

Here’s another tip that might help you get started organizing your photos, both physical and digital: DUPLICATES!!!

If you’re like pretty much every person on the planet, you have a bunch of duplicates. And those are taking up a ton of space, either in real life or on your computer or device.

Why is knowing you have a gob of duplicates going to make you want to start organizing? Because you can shrink your collection quickly and dramatically just by getting rid of them! What originally seemed like a mountain of photos has suddenly become a more manageable collection.

The great thing about deduplicating is that it doesn’t take a lot of brain power or emotional effort. For digital photos, you can run a deduplication program that will find a lot of those duplicates for you. You don’t need a lot of technical know-how to find exact duplicates, so you can cull a lot of photos really quickly. Then, depending on how comfortable you feel with the software, you can tweak the settings to find different subsets of duplicates, and you can even find photos that are similar to each other so that you can pick the best photo from a series of shots.

When it comes to print photos, there’s a good chance there’s a span of time in the ‘90s and beyond where you got duplicates (or triplicates! Quadruplicates?!) every time you developed a roll of film. It was that golden era when printing photos was fast and cheap, and we figured we might as well get extras in case there were a few good ones in there we might want to share with friends or family.

If you know there are boxes or envelopes from that era that have duplicates,  that could be a great place to start your organizing! It takes no time at all to zip through those rolls of film and weed out the duplicates. And suddenly you’ve halved the number of photos you need to deal with!

But as I am going through my own family photo collection I am reminded that there can be print duplicates from any era. Even images from the early 1900s could be represented by multiple copies. As I’ve been ingesting photo collections from various family members, I’m discovering the same photos over and over. In my family, at least, it was common practice to send copies of photos to family members near and far. What’s so great about this is that not only will I have fewer photos to archive – I can pick the best from the bunch to keep – but when people sent these photos to family members, they often included a lot of information on the back of the photo! Now I’ve got all kinds of metadata and stories that go along with these photos.

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Be sure to take note of any differing information that you might find on the backs of these print duplicates. As you can see from my example, I found two photos of my great-grandmother with a bunch of turkeys. 😹 The top photo is clearly the keeper because it is darker. But take a look at the backs of the photos: one says “Kate Klapp” and the other “Grandma Kate.” In this instance, knowing that Kate was someone’s grandma isn’t particularly helpful, but what if those labels were reversed? If the underexposed photo was labeled “Kate Klapp,” I would want to be sure I added that last name to the photo I was keeping before tossing out that lesser photo.

This goes for the information that comes along with digital duplicates as well. A recent client of mine had a lot of digital duplicates in her genealogy collection, but what made deduplicating them tricky was that each copy had unique information attached to it that the second didn’t have, and vice versa. So, in those instances, it’s important to be sure you’ve gleaned all the important info from the extra copy before you toss it.

Speaking of tossing, the next question is: what do you do with all those print duplicates? In most cases, photographs are not recyclable because of the chemicals used in processing. However, that doesn’t mean they have to clog the landfill! You can pass them along to people who might be in the photos and would enjoy having a copy; you can get crafty and use the photos for any number of projects, like this box I made decades ago by shellacking duplicates to a shoe box; you can donate them to local schools and colleges to be used for crafting or art projects; you can ask local historical societies if they’d be interested in your older photos; and you can even shred them for use as sturdy packing material! All it takes is a search on the internet or Pinterest and you’ll find no end of fun ways to use those extra prints. 

It’s really rewarding to suddenly have a box of photos (or a digital trash bin) that can go off to another life and not keep clogging up your collection!  

As I continue to sort through my own family’s photo collection, I keep finding unexpected reasons I’m glad I finally took the plunge. I mentioned the other day what fun it is finding treasures that aren’t even photos.

But the obvious payoff I think most of us are expecting are the photos themselves. And in my collection, there are certainly no end of photos of family members that are charming, sweet, funny, poignant, etc.

I came across this photo, though, and it took my breath away. I don’t even know who is in it or when or where it was taken (I have some guesses), but it is such a beautifully captured moment in time that it could stand alone as a piece of artwork. And this is just a quick camera scan without any editing!

Have you come across anything like this in your own family’s collection? A photo that stands out not because of who is in it, but because it is just a stunning photograph in and of itself?

Here’s another reason I’m so glad I finally got started on my own family’s photo collection: it’s been a blast to find non-photo treasures!

If you already know what’s in your collection, or if you know everything you have is a photograph, this may not apply to you. But my family’s collection contains every bit of memorabilia ever saved, going back to the 1800s! (If anyone needs an obituary, I probably have it.)

This might seem overwhelming at first, but you can think of it as a treasure hunt. You never know what little gems you might find! For instance, check out this incredible photo album. It has its own stand and little drawer, and part of the album is made of fabric. Unfortunately, there weren’t any little treats in the drawer, but I like to imagine what little trinkets might have lived in there.

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And you know how we’re told to hold on to our tax receipts for so many years? Evidently my forebears took that really seriously, because I have property tax receipts going all the way back to 1871! Ah, what I would give to pay $6.96 in property tax on our farm this year…

I was also charmed by the postcards album featuring cards from the early 1900s. So lovely!

What kinds of non-photo treasures have you come across as you’ve gone through your memorabilia collections?

As I’m progressing on my family’s photo collection, I’m reminded of another benefit to getting started organizing your photos: doing a broad, quick sort is fun and immediately gratifying!

Chances are, you have a box in your collection that contains a hodgepodge of photos – different people, different decades, different types of prints, all jumbled into one big mess. Maybe the disarray of this box is keeping you from getting started on your photo organizing journey!

But what might seem like the most daunting box in your collection can actually be the most rewarding to start with!

The trick is to make it fun and do it fast. This isn’t the time to scrutinize tiny faces with a magnifying glass to decide if that’s Aunt Mabel or Aunt Bessie. Or agonize if it’s Christmas 1973 or 1974. 

Just put on your gloves and start sorting your prints by what the prints themselves look like. Are they color or black and white? Rectangular or square? Are the edges smooth or deckled? Are the borders wide or narrow? Is there a decorative flourish in the border or is it plain?

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To me, this feels almost like a card game. It’s fun to match each photo with others of the same type! And you can start off sorting into very general categories, such as color and black and white, then take those batches and sort more specifically within them.

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Plus, these initial sorts don’t have to be perfect, they are just intended to get similar photos together so that they will be easier to sort later on. And you may have some oddball photos that just don’t fit anywhere, and that’s fine, too! For instance, I came across a ton of school photos and portraits of all sizes, so I just put those all into a “portrait” pile for the time being.

Once you’ve gotten your box sorted into these general piles, you can put on your detective hat and start looking for other clues on the prints to determine which photos belong together: are there numbers or markings on the back? What kind of paper was it printed on? Do some photos seem to share the same general appearance, like having an orange cast to them?

In no time at all, you can go from a mess to a more organized starting point to identify and sort your photos, all without really looking at the subject of the photo! And as you can see from my examples, it won’t be too difficult to now to put these in batches by decade, which will make further chronological organizing even easier.

Are you faced with a large collection of family photos and memorabilia that you need to organize, but you’re putting off starting? You’re not alone! Starting can be the hardest part of the process.

I’m taking a break between clients to organize and digitize my own family’s collection because, as family members have moved or passed away, we have inherited all of the family photos and mementos going back to at least 1870. That’s a lot of stuff! We are preparing for a move overseas, so now is the time to get this done.

I wanted to share some tips over the next few weeks that might motivate you to get started organizing your own collection! And if you have any tips of your own, please share in the comments!

The first tip is one that is probably in the back of everyone’s minds, but it’s good to be reminded:

Everything Decays! It’s called ephemera for a reason – photos, videos, scrapbooks, uniforms, anything you might save as a keepsake, these are all subject to the ravages of time and the environment. But if these items aren’t stored properly, that degradation is accelerated and precious items can be lost.

I wanted to share a photo of what I discovered in one of the keepsake tubs. Years ago, we found these keepsakes in cardboard boxes in the garage, so we transferred them to plastic tubs until we could decide what to do with them. As you can see, the items in one of the tubs became moldy and many of the photos and papers in the tub were ruined or badly damaged.

So, the sooner you get started on your project, the sooner you can get your cherished memories into appropriate storage to help slow the degradation. And, if you’re able to digitize everything, you’ll have a copy to enjoy for generations to come!