Project Profile: Photo Organizing

We find plastic bags, shoeboxes, albums, airtight bins, and file folders full of photos in our clients' homes. Some are organized by year or event, while others are entirely random. Photos from the 1990s through early 2000s often have a helpful timestamp (that is hopefully accurate!), while others may have a handwritten note that describes the content of the photo. Most printed photos are a mystery to the generations that are trying to get organized. Countless people are asking questions like: Who are these people? Are we related? When did they live? And always - what am I supposed to do with all of these photos?

I have worked on dozens of photo organizing projects during my time at The Little Details. I have picked just three to review here to illustrate the range of projects that we work on. And to show you that no matter how scary dealing with those photos might be to you, we can help.

A Closet Full of Photos in Boston

This client did a lot of work on organizing her photos before we got there. This closet full of boxes were organized into plastic bags by event and clearly labeled. This made our job pretty easy - we scanned the photos, titled them according to the name on the plastic bag, and added dates wherever we could. Once scanned, these photos were added to albums on the Apple iCloud Photos app. This client chose to keep her physical photos in their boxes and bags, but now has much easier access to see wonderful old memories!

A second part of this project was transferring old photos from Flickr (where she had stored them for years) back over to Apple iCloud Photos. This was a painstaking process because all of the Flickr photos had to be downloaded and then re-imported. Photos take up a lot of space. If you are planning to move any volume of them to a sharing platform, be sure to keep records of what has and has not been transferred yet.

Cambridge Album Retention

This client had boxes of beautifully created photo albums and scrapbooks from her mom that sat in her attic for years. She decided that she was finally ready to be able to share them more broadly and came to us for help. This client wanted to have all of the photos and memorabilia scanned, but to also keep the albums intact at the end of the project.

This made for a real challenge for our team! We photographed all of the albums and their pages to document how every single page was laid out, prepped the photos for scanning by removing every one of them very carefully keeping them in order, and then painstakingly returned every photo and paper to its appropriate page in each album. Scanning these photos to be high quality did require removing them from the albums, but we made sure to put them back just as they came. The client ended up with 3 gigabytes of photo data and all of her albums looked like they had never been touched!

Newton Digital Photo Archive

Our client in Newton had already worked with a digitizing company to scan old photos into digital files, but the digital storage of her photos was a mess. For anyone who has experience using the iCloud Photos application, you may remember iPhoto. When Apple updated iPhoto to become iCloud Photos, a lot of disorganization followed. This client had hundreds upon hundreds of photo albums, many nested within each other, and without any overarching categorization.

She wanted to create yearly photo books out of her digital library for her children to enjoy, but was completely overwhelmed by the volume of existing albums and the different storage locations of photos on her computer. We worked together to create album folders and albums by year, as well as albums for individual events.

We consolidated photos from her desktop, downloads, and documents folders and pulled them off of CDs and thumb drives from around the office. We updated import settings to ensure that the highest quality version of the photo was always being saved in iCloud to have that built-in backup. And she worked on going through her photos and deleting what she didn't need. This project took much longer than we originally expected due to the layers of different data that we found throughout her computer, but she ended up with a much more organized library!

There are so many ways to approach organizing your photos and we’re happy to walk you through the process. Reach out here if you’d like to schedule a digital organizing session with our team.