I just inherited a dozen shoeboxes worth of old photos, which are a mishmash of all different types of photo formats (Polaroids, Kodak, professional pictures, mall-pictures-with-Santa, those old-school photos with the scalloped white edge) throughout the years. The pictures themselves appear to be in pretty good condition for the most part, but of course I’m not a restorer so I don’t know how to judge. Ranging from the 1950’s to the early 2000’s, all mixed together. Just to get it in chronological order will be a huge task. I recognize probably 95% of the people and settings so it seems possible, but it’s going to be a huge job and I’m setting aside some time to chip away at it over the next few months. I’m going to sort by decade first and then go from there!
Once I do that, however, what is the best way to preserve this all for future generations? I assume scanning, but then how do I identify the people / dates (which are mostly written on the backs of photos)? Are there places that do this for me, and if so, is it going to cost a fortune? I have gotten old videos put on CD’s - but aren’t CD’s becoming obsolete, should these be on external jump drives / zip drives instead? Does it complicate matters that these are all different format / size pictures?
The only people who will want access to this would be my sister and me (and maybe one day our kids). There isn’t extended family so I’m not necessarily looking for an online database (though am not averse to the idea).
Separately, once I tackle this project, I do have my own neatly-maintained photo albums from the 1980’s through about 2007 when I basically stopped using anything but the iPhone / Facebook for photo storage. They’re the typical self-sticking photo albums, but at least they are organized. Should I digitize those too? That would be lower priority. I could get super-ambitious and try to “meld” the two sets of photos together, but I’m loathe to at this point.
I’m sure some of you have been through this - words of advice?
It is going to be time consuming, but the cheapest route would be to scan each individual photo yourself. To identify the people/dates, you can give each individual photo a title in your computer instead of the likely auto-generated title from your scanner (ex. SCAN001, SCAN002). You could then organize the photos in folders by year/event/etc.
I saw a cool idea online about family “yearbooks.” Instead of printing the individual photos and physically putting them in albums, the photos are printed on the page directly, just like a HS yearbook would be. I imagine that a company like Shutterfly.com might be able to give you some neat ideas should you want to continue to print pictures, etc.
I strongly recommend writing the dates/names on the back and getting a double sided scanner . then the back and the front are in one “document”. We tried to rename the photos, but it just got to be a LOT of work. We had BOXES to do.
For us, it was better to focus on name, then scan and capture, then divide. (full disclosure, divide isn’t happening, yet! but at least they are saved and jump drives made for family. they can do their own sorting if they get impatient for mine).
Then after they are scanned, you can poke through the photos and rename them as you sort them. Also can run some facial recognition SW if you want to get fancy…
The sticky photo albums are destructive to old photos. A couple of years ago, I took all mine out of sticky albums and put them in albums with pockets. I’m about 3/4 the way through finishing that project.
I’m in the process of organizing a bunch of old family photos, some of which are in poor condition. Recently I scanned a bunch at CVS ($0.25 each), in which everything was resized down to 4" x 6" prints for a hard copy, and then had a CD made of all the images ($3.99). As you say, the CD will become obsolete. But I put the images on my hard drive and keep the CD as an extra backup.
I am also in the middle of going through boxes of old photos. I am using an acid-free marker to date the back of each and for now am using photo storage cases to sort them by approx. year. I bought some cases at Costco that have 12 individual clear plastic boxes per case, each box enough to store 100 4x6 photos- so 1200 pictures per case. I have labeled each box with a year. As I sort them, I place the best pictures that I want in albums on the top of each box so that when I am done sorting I can go back through, scan those and possibly mount them in books. I have thrown out a LOT of pictures that are either very fuzzy, or contain people we don’t know. I have also gone through my old photo albums that were the sticky type and re-mounted pictures using corners on acid free paper. The corners you buy now are stick-on vs. the old ones you had to lick- yuck- so it went pretty fast. I stayed away from the pocket type sheets because we have old ones and the pockets start splitting after a while so the photos get loose. I also thought about “melding” my existing albums with the new pictures chronologically, but it would have been overwhelming so decided to leave the existing albums as-is (except for re-doing to get rid of sticky stuff) and just have separate albums for the new batch of pictures. Good luck Pizzagirl- it is a tedious job and I still have a long way to go!
I think a while back I started a thread about wanting to convert some DVD-R formatted discs to regular DVD discs. My problem was that there were some DVD-R discs that I did not finalize after recording events, so I was told repeatedly that they couldn’t be transferred without finalizing. And unfortunately, I no longer had the camcorder that I captured these images with, so there was no option of going back and finalizing them.
However, a couple of weeks ago, I found a business down in the city who said they can transfer those DVD-R discs even if they hadn’t been finalized, so I think the technology has progressed. When I dropped off all my old DVD-R discs I asked the owner what his success rate was with this kind of transfer. He said 95%, so I was thrilled to find him. He said my order would be ready this week, and I haven’t heard back from him that he wasn’t able to do the conversion, so I’m cautiously optimistic. And the costs? $5 per DVD-R… a steal.
When I get those back, I have a LOT of high school alumnae who are going to want copies of the production they did of Into The Woods, after having the film version released this last Christmas. When I get that done, I will get back to my photo project.
I also recently started organizing photos, some of which are 40+ years old. The only ones in albums are from when DD was a baby until about 2, and her college graduation; a family trip to Spain; and of course our wedding album. I know I won’t be able to get exact dates for many of the photos, but I can recognize all the important people. Once I weed out the bad/duplicate pictures. I plan to get them commercially scanned and have Snapfish make custom books with various themes (vacations/holidays/birthdays/elementary school, etc) to keep or give as gifts. I should be able to do captions to record people and known dates. This is going to take a long time…I’m just halfway through pulling out discards from about a dozen boxes, and it’s already taken about 15 hours (some of that time spent with happy memories, other with perplexed staring!)
I’ve been emailing back and forth for a while with one person (the only friend I’m in touch with from that long ago) trying to identify all the children in our elementary school class photos, from kindergarten through 6th grade, which I recently came across in going through my father’s possessions after he died. So we’re trying to recognize many kids whom neither of us has seen in 50-odd years.
The earlier photos, in which the kids are about 5 years old, are especially difficult. But it’s surprising how many we’ve been able to identify. The other person has a way better memory for names and faces than I do, although I’ve been amazed at what even I remember. (We both stared at one little blonde girl in a kindergarten photo taken in the spring of 1960, and the name “Andrea” independently popped into each of our heads.)
When we’re done, I’m going to email copies to the school for their website, where they’ve put up class photos from a number of other classes. I’ve been using Paint to insert the names we’ve been able to remember in the photos, next to each child.
Such a huge task! I started scanning old photos a few years ago, and saving them on an external hard drive. Then Thanksgiving came along, and I had to actually use the dining room table for other things… Fast forward three years, and not much has happened since then. Gah!
I have made use of Costco and Snapfish to make hardcover books of the best of the old photos as I scan them. I really like those books, and the digital photos are stored in albums at the Costco or .snapfish site, so you can always order more books.
But I’m not discarding the hard copies of the old photos, either, so it seems that I’m really only creating yet another storage space for old photos. (photos in albums, old negatives in boxes, newer digital photos on camera cards, and some photos stored on my phone… And the scanned photos stored on an external hard drive.)
What I’m really worried about is losing my phone before I get around to downloading the 5000 stored there to…um can those photos be downloaded to a hard drive?
Lots of old threads on organizing old photos…
Are CD’s becoming obsolete? Not yet. At the moment there are too many out there for them not to be covered when the next techno generation comes along. Consider our current generation a sort of “tipping point”. And they last a long time. Save them to a CD rather than DVD if you want them for generations. You can convert them if something new comes along.
Don’t save everything for a scan. Pick the best, history etc. if your purpose is saving family history. Record that info on the CD.
Photo books are fine but not for generational use–make CD’s and spread them around to your family. A CD can last 100 years (but keep converting as technology goes). A DVD lasts about 50 years.
Very old photos were made with much better photo chemicals (like silver!) and still survive today despite a 100 years. Commercial photo processing will last much longer than anything done on your home computer. It just depends.
You can scan them yourself. It’s just time consuming.
It’s that happy remembering that takes so long! And also the “who the h*ll is this?” moments! Maybe we should trade each others piles of photos. They’d get done a lot faster!
"I’ve been emailing back and forth for a while with one person (the only friend I’m in touch with from that long ago) trying to identify all the children in our elementary school class photos, from kindergarten through 6th grade, which I recently came across in going through my father’s possessions after he died. "
Donna - if you or the other person are on Facebook, post the picture there - if you have mutual friends, they will all come out of the woodwork to identify / tag people!
only down side to it is the max width is 8.5. So I couldn’t scan my GGGGGrandfather’s deed to the farm signed by CHester Authur. It was too big.
But for papers and photos it scans fast and very well. My DH spent hours doing the scans of boxes of photos. Now I can go online and rename a few at a time rather than try to do it all at once. And now they are scanned and safe (as safe as dual backups and the cloud can make them anyway).
There are places that will scan them for you. I’ve looked at scanmyphotos.com but haven’t actually used them. They charge by what fits in a prepaid box. You would still have to label in some way. I also upload photos to smugmug. You could then easily share the photos with relatives. You can give photos a caption on smugmug so everyone knows who’s in the photo.
I recently got a canon lide 120 (it was very inexpensive) and it is very easy, I just put 4 pics on at a time and did pics over a few days to avoid the tedium.
@eastcoascrazy – perhaps I misunderstand your question, but are you asking if photos can be downloaded from your phone onto a HD?
“What I’m really worried about is losing my phone before I get around to downloading the 5000 stored there to…um can those photos be downloaded to a hard drive”
Are you trying to bypass your computer in this step? If not, all I do is attach the camera (or the phone) to the computer, download photos in iPhoto, and then copy to the external drive. Some people prefer to upload to the cloud, but I just make a second copy to another drive and store it in the safe deposit box. (Fear of house fire, not theft! Have never had a fire or break-in, but I have a LOT of photos.)
Anyone looking for an easy photo-sharing platform…I love Dropbox. You cannot use it for storage unless you pay their annual fee, but for easy sharing of full-resolution images, it’s excellent, and much improved since its early days.
OK—a bit off topic, and reminding me that I have not used my Epson V700 photo scanner in years. Procrastination…
