Service Spotlight: Organizing & Scanning Photos
Photography has revolutionized in the past 20 years. While photography used to be a costly and time intensive hobby, now anyone can snap a photo (or 10,000) with a smartphone or tablet. How one chooses to organize their photos is a very personal decision that can have an impact for generations to come.
We love to help our clients organize their photos and bring physical photos into the digital age. Most clients have a large number of physical photos in their homes. Some are in frames, others in bins, some are organized and others are a complete jumble. Many people describe their family photos as their most precious belongings but avoid dealing with them for years, if not decades. Making the choice to scan your family photos should always start with a thorough review of what you have, and deciding what is worth the time and money required to do the digitizing.
Prep
How we prep photos depends entirely on the needs of the client and the status of the photos. In a recent photo organizing project, a client asked us to scan all of the photos in a photo album individually - and wanted us to recreate the album as we went. This is an incredibly time consuming process, as it requires not only the act of removing the images and scanning them, but also keeping track of the page layout and pasting all of the images back in to the photo books. If a client wants to speed up their photo scanning project, removing all of the photos from albums or scrapbooks and organizing them into plastic bags is the first step! No one knows their photos as well as you do, so this process also offers an opportunity to remove any blurry or low-quality photos or to pass along photos that might be more meaningful to another member of your family. It is also a time to decide which photos you really want to have scanned – there is nothing wrong with being discerning about which photos you want to store permanently.
Digital Storage
Before you think about scanning, consider how you want to store these photos digitally. As with any digital organizing project, it is always helpful to start with some digital decluttering. Knowing what you have stored and where will make this process so much more efficient. Depending on how tech savvy they are, I suggest one of two things for clients when it comes to photo storage:
If you are pretty tech savvy and up for a larger digital organizing project, I suggest picking one location for all of your digital files and putting your photos there. In my case, I use OneDrive because it is secure, offers a lot of storage at a low annual price, and includes the full Microsoft Suite. Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud are also all good options. The most important thing is to consolidate so that you are not stuck looking across multiple platforms for your most precious memories.
If you are less tech savvy, and just want to have access to your newly scanned photos, I suggest putting your photos wherever you currently store photos. For most iPhone users, this is iCloud Photos. For most Android users, this is Google Photos. You can make albums for your scanned photos. On iCloud Photos, you can make album folders to keep them even more organized. Google Photos does not allow the creation of album folders but has very sophisticated image recognition and sorting options to keep track of things.
Scanning
Our team uses the ScanSnap iX1500 scanner. It is fast, easy to use, and produces high quality images. We always scan photos in small chunks to make sure that nothing delicate gets stuck in the scanner, and to keep the newly digitized photos organized. We scan photos into folders based on the client's preferred method of storage and organization. For most clients, this is by album or by events within albums. As we scan, we review the photos and make small edits as needed (like removing blank images or flipping them right side up). What a client chooses to do with their photos after they are scanned is another very personal decision – some will throw them all away, while others keep both photos and negatives in perpetuity. There is no right or wrong answer! What you choose to do will depend on what is important to you, how much space you have, and what you are willing to commit to for long term storage.
Negatives, Slides, Reels, and Tapes
There are many other forms of media that can be digitized. Our team does not work on digitizing of negatives, slides, reels, or tapes. To get digital copies made, we usually suggest working with Everpresent, a local company that is dedicated to long term preservation of your memories. There are a number of other companies around the country that offer these services with mail-in boxes as well.
Do you want to finally tackle your boxes of family photos? Reach out to us to learn more about scanning and digital organization today!
