Do you have a mountain of photos that you don't know what
to do with?
Well, you're in luck.
We're going to talk to
you about how to downsize and organize that photo collection
with family history in mind.
Howdy, I'm Devon Noel Lee with
Family History Fanatics where we help you understand your
DNA, climb your family tree, and write your ancestor stories
along the way and yes, organization fits into this
because it's about climbing that tree and organizing and
writing the stories behind all of those photos but a viewer
recently asked me this.
I have eleven bins full of photo
albums and loose photos and I don't even know where to begin
to get this mess organized well let's talk about some of the
things that I've learned about organization while downsizing
myself and my mother and lots of other friends.
The first
step is to breathe.
Okay do it with me.
Okay now that
breathing is out of the way we're going to set aside some
time to begin the process of digitizing the photos but
you're thinking that's a lot of photos.
Well, you're right and
not every photo in that collection deserves to be
digitized or kept.
So, before you digitize, you need to
organize.
Organize to digitize and organize also means getting
rid of clutter.
The first thing you need to do is to start
sorting your photos and photo galvans into categories.
So, as
you're sorting these photo album you're looking at them
and say, oh, this is my Comforts from Canada.
These are
my Townsends from Ohio.
These are my mom as a teenager.
Start
sorting them by surnames, locations, something that makes
sense to you because the next step is to downsize.
I know, I
know, I know.
People get so mad at me when I say downsize your
photo collection.
What does that mean?
Well, let's say will
take the Comforts from Canada.
It's entirely possible that
those Comforts from Canada are not your primary lines that you
want to research.
You want to spend more time on your towns
and you want to spend more times on your mom's collection
and your own personal history.
So, one way you can downsize
those photos is to find other family members who will take
good care of those photos and give them your collection to
them or you can look for genealogical societies,
historical organizations from the area your ancestors were
from and consider making a donation to them.
The other
thing that's part of downsizing is tossing up some photos.
I
know, I know, I get so many people so mad at me but yes,
you need to learn how to downsize your photo collection.
That means getting rid of all of the duplicates.
We have a
lot of duplicates of the same image in our collections and we
need to get rid of them.
We also need to get rid of the
blurry photos where you just can't tell what that was but
chances are you're never going to use those blurry
pictures so get rid of them.
So, get rid of blurry, get rid
of duplicates, get rid of photos that you know you and
nobody else is going to take time to restore because they're
so poorly damaged.
If the photos have mold on them, get
rid of them, downsize to photos that people are not likely want
to see in the future.
Then, you can go to the next step.
Now,
in this step, we're going to do fine sorting and in fine
sorting, this is when I like to organize my photos in
chronological order.
Now, before you start messing up the
organizational system of your photograph, follow the advice
from my friend, Melissa Barker, the archive lady.
Take a
picture of the collection, the organized one, the photo
albums, not the loose ones and take a picture of how the
images were arranged in the photo album because that could
tell you a story and then, if your photos are in photo albums
that are not high-quality archival albums, gently remove
them and start putting them in chronological order because I
have a blog post over on my blog that talks about how I
solve the mystery because I put those photos in chronological
order.
Additionally, when you go to the next stage which is
digitize, you want these images in chronological order because
the scan scanning improves when you have similarly colorized
photos together.
You don't have a Sepia with the 1980s vibrant
neon color image together running through a scanner.
So,
organize them chronologically to improve the storytelling but
also the digitization.
The other reason why you want to do
the spine sort is organized is you don't want to have create a
big old digital mess.
So, get things organized physically so
that when you do digitize your photos, they are organized as
well.
So, then, you need to start turning your attention to
digitizing your collection.
So, when you digitize your
collection, you can outsource it.
Yeah, there are a number of
companies that can help you digitize not only those photo
albums and those loose photos but they can also handle your
slides and your negatives as well as other media which we're
not talking about today but if you are seriously overwhelmed
and you're and or actually you're technologically
challenged with scanning photos, then yourself some
slack ask for birthday gifts hey I want this stuff digitized
somebody by me the birthday gifts gift or anniversary gift
or some holiday gift or just a gift because we survive some
crisis recently or just because treat yourself to outsourcing
it you'll find a link to these companies in the description
box now if outsourcing is not in your budget you can use
Flatbed scanners.
Now, I have used my flatbed on my
all-in-one printer combination.
There is some debate whether
it's good enough but y'all if you're going to photograph scan
something, use what you have and you will be surprised how
quickly you can get the job done and the quality that's
going to be available to you, I just would avoid using a wand
scanner because it doesn't do that good of a job.
There are
some other scanners you might want to check out.
There is the
FlipPow mobile scanner.
There will be a link to that in the
box.
The FlipPal mobile scanner allows you to hold this
portable scanner.
It's small over your images and scan
things in that way.
Another option is to get the JoyFlips
app and you can use that and the joy of flipping through
your photo album as you're holding your tablet or phone
over and then it will scan the pages and then cut them up as
well.
Though those are a lot of options for scanning and
digitizing that photo bin collection.
Then what?
What are
you going to do?
The next thing you want to do with all of
those photos is share them.
After you've digitized them,
maybe you then want to take those photos and donate them to
an archive library or you want to donate them to other
family members so that you have the digital copies and someone
else can hold on to the physical copy something you
should be thinking about as you're downsizing for the
future what are you going to do with this plan but now that you
have the digital images you need to do something with them
so they don't just stay in a box somewhere forever or on a
hard drive so I highly recommend you consider telling
stories with your photos one format is to do scrapbooking
you can check out the description box for links on
how to create scrapbooks using Photoshop Element Shutterfly,
or mixed books here on this channel.
You can also share
your images in online trees.
Family Search has a great
resource to help you share your images with your family member
especially for the deceased persons in your family and I am
an advocate of writing family stories.
You can write short
stories, children's books.
There's a number of different
formats you can choose.
Check the description box for a link
to a video on which format to use but notice you can put
pictures in all of these book formats to help tell your
story.
Taking care of your photos is probably the most
important genealogical task that you can do right now to
preserve your family history.
If you need more tips and
tricks on how to organize anything in your collection,
check out this playlist right here.