Pick out the FAVORITE photos and caption them in some way.
But unfortunately, my fav photos from my mom and dad are sort of random to them and they would never have picked them out as something to save for the generations. . Just them in casual settings with their friends at parties etc.
Yes! Also, I learned from a friend to never crop photos (like people do for scrapbooking). She pointed out that doing so cuts out the old couches, phones, TVs, etc.
We have a lot of family photos. Some of the old ones are in albums, but a lot of the ones we’ve inherited from various relatives aren’t. Many of those are still in the original envelopes and most of them have at least a year written on the outer envelope. I start my organizing by putting the envelopes into photo boxes (one per decade). When I have a full box, I start transferring them to photo albums (also one per decade).
I work in television where every tape has a number, so labeling is a habit that I’ve carried over into my photo albums. I label a photo sized card with the date (such as “19521225” for Christmas 1952). If there were 3 rolls from that day, I’d make 3 ID cards: 19521225.1, 19521225.2, and 19521225.3. If the roll had two events on it, I’d give it 2 numbers (for instance, 19521225 for Christmas and 19530101 for New Year’s). If I know the location, I’ll add that to the card too. I put the ID card (and envelope) in the first slot of the photo album, then put all the photos from that roll after it. The card for roll 2 comes next followed by all it’s photos, and so on. I have a separate album for the negatives that I label the same way. It may seem like a lot of work, but it’s helpful because our family takes a LOT of photos. I try to do some labeling on the photos as I go. If I know the location, I’ll put that on the back of the first photo. If I know any of the people, I’ll label as many photos as it takes to have everyone identified at least once.
One of my sisters and I have started making digital photo albums for our siblings and their children. I like the digital because we can copy the photos and add family stories. I especially like that we can make one album and print as many copies as we want. But the master copies stay in the albums.
@takeitallin – you will have to return to post your experience with the Epson scanner. Convinced that I was going to dedicate myself to scanning the thousands of photos I have filed in chronological order in plastic photo boxes in the basement, I got the Epson V700 photo scanner. I gave up quickly as I just couldn’t force myself to sit and load the negative strips into the plastic frame and would sometimes load the negatives backwards.
I am on my third Nikon DSLR and shot with a Nikon film SLR before that. I didn’t move to digital until SLR prices came down to about $1000 for the body. For a few years prior to going digital, I had my negatives scanned to disc instead of printing when I developed film. So, most photos taken since 2002 are on my computer nicely organized, more or less. (While a diehard Mac user, I have not developed a good photo filing system. I can’t seem to duplicate my simple Windows hierarchy of say, 2007: Ireland: Dublin.)
It is the twenty years of photos taken prior to 2002 that need to be scanned. Somehow I find the energy to cull and scan hundreds of photos for a graduation slideshow video or a milestone birthday or funeral, but I can’t seem to bring myself to put in the time required to just scan everything proactively instead of ad hoc.
I worry about loss in case of a fire, so I keep the back-up drive in the safe deposit box. The drive stored there is a few months out of date, but at least I would have the vast majority of my photos in the event of a fire. I haven’t tried cloud storage b/c I have so many GB of photos (1.3 TB on computer and I think most of it must be photos. Must delete years of HS & summer swimming, HS XC photos, things I will never need again…)
I only seem to create photo albums as gifts and do not have any for my immediate family, but I can lay my hands on photos as needed.
@takeitallin – if nothing else, you inspired me to ask my tech-savvy son to install the Epson scanner on my old Mac as the old-old Mac that had been attached to the scanner is now gone. Perhaps reading of your success will prompt me to take action!
I have a portable scanner that reads up to 4x6 and negatives. I scanned 30 years worth of negatives and took it with me when visiting relatives and scanned the pictures they had. My dad has scanned all of his slides. They are on my computer, DVDs, a portable hard drive and SD cards that are in the firesafe. Plus my siblings have most of the same photos.
One of the benefits of a bout of unemployment was the time to scan photos. I’ve always organized my photos in 2 ways – an album that had the year’s highlights, and a archival box that held all the other photos and negatives. A few years ago, when I lost my job, I bought a scanner and spent the year scanning in ALL of my photos – including my grandparents’, which date back to the early 1900s. I scanned in more than 10,000 photos, and the whole thing – including labeling, organizing and photoshopping – took about a year. If I had negatives, I scanned them instead of the photos, and the quality is much, much better than scanning in photos.
And the labeling is really important. I label all the scanned images first with the year, then with the event. So, 1992Christmas; 1983BobsWedding. If there are 10 photos, then 1983BobsWedding1, 1983BobsWedding2.
All my digital images (which for me means all of my photos) are saved in the cloud – I use SmugMug. On SmugMug I organize by theme – holidays, birthdays, vacations. On my computer (using iPhoto – which I don’t like but feel stuck with), the images are organized chronologically. Having two organizing systems means that I can usually find a photo pretty quickly. Both my husband and daughter have full access to SmugMug.
In 2011 I stopped getting prints of my digital photos. I now make photobooks. They take up much less space on my bookshelves.
All this does take a lot of time, and it really helped that I’ve always organized my photos.
When I look at my grandparents’ photos, they had so few – a couple hundred covering dozens of years. I can take a couple hundred photos in less than a week when on vacation. Scanning and organizing and appreciating those photos was easy because there were so few of them – not sure how people in the future are going to deal with all the thousands of images that we now produce.
I went to look for some photos for kids first years and the photo album i used is falling apart and letting the pics fall out. I guess that’s as good a reason as any to start the process. A few years ago DD went through all of the loose ones not in photo albums and made boxes for each child with the duplicates so that part is done. I found scanning in on the multipurpose a pain so am interested in more specialized scanners.
I was diligent for years, did an album, the old peel back the page and stick the photo on the gummy page stype, typed up names & dates & details. 20+ years ago when life changed (when I went back to work after SAHM) and then as the kids grew, they would take photos out of the albums, I gave up for a while.
I now have ALL my photos out of the closet and have boxes on a big table, I want to try to do a little each day, or at least several days a week.
I am also thinking about doing a photobook for each year, start with 2014 and work my way back in time to print an annual photo book.
@Singersmom07 – unless I am doing something incorrectly, the specialized scanners function much the same as an HP flatbed scanner, in that you still need to position three of four photos on the screen, wait for scan to complete, save scanned page with a name to file.
I then pull the scan into iPhoto, duplicate the file the # of times needed, and crop each photo individually.
The specialized photo scanners do allow scanning of negatives and slides, and IIRC, I can scan the negatives for a full roll of film all at once, as opposed to only three or four photos. I should probably fire up that Epson V700 to make sure that I am passing along accurate info. I haven’t found a way around the tedium of scanning other than outsourcing the task, but I am not willing to do that.
I have used MyPublisher.com for about ten years now to create photobooks of trips and events over the course of the year. At first I was fanatic about editing the photos and writing little blurbs, but now I get the project done as fast as possible after the trip/event and worry less about making it “perfect”. Good enough is better than not getting it done!
My method is: put all the photos I might use for a project in a single folder. Open the MyPublisher software (there are other digital book publishers, but we’ve found they have the best color control) and pick the photos I actually want to use. Place them on pages. Go through and caption the ones I want to caption (which is far from all of them). Wait a week. Review. (The week is important, because it prevents too much sloppiness.) Send off to be printed.
I want to second @dmd77 's endorsement of My Publisher. I first used the company ten years ago also, and have been consistently happy with the results. Just to compare, I tried Shutterfly and the other one run by Kokak (Snapfish perhaps) and My Publisher produced a better final product. Their leather and linen covers are very nice. They are constantly running sales so sign up in order to receive their sale emails. I believe they even offer a free book to new customers.
Re: printing photos. I have found Costco to have the best color reproduction and when the print looks wrong, they reprint for free. I printed the exact same photo at Costco, CVS, Shutterfly, Snapfish and our our local photo shop. Costco was best, and least expensive. I upload photos from home and pick them up at Costco an hour later. Enlargements take an extra hour and are far less expensive than alternatives.
I really need to motivate myself to continue to make the photo books. I got a Groupon a few years ago and created several, but now, of course, I have a zillion more photos. Most of my photos are on my iPhone now. Does My Publisher or any of the other companies have an app that will let me upload them from my phone so I don’t have to go back and forth between my phone and computer?
I’m going to walk in blind on this one, never having created a photo book and not having an iPhone.
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I came across this one. I know I’ve seen app indexes or libraries online and that there are frequently multiple different apps for the same function, some better than others. I didn’t check to see what other similar apps are out there.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/create-photo-books-from-your/id548773050?mt=8
I came across something new today, Wikia Maps. I don’t know how exactly it works, but I suppose it could be used if you wanted to create a personalized geographical map rather than sort chronologically. It looks like there are all kinds of possibilities.
Better terms for what I was trying to say in my previous post would probably be “apps store” and “online reviews”.
@Deborah T – you are the research queen! People should pay you for your help. I am thrilled with my Saucony running shoes that arrived from 6pm, per your suggestion on the other thread.
I still think the real issue here is that there is no easy way to scan photos w/o either paying someone or spending HOURS.
We paid S1 to scan piles of old family photos.
Well as for scanning stuff I’ve discovered simpler the better. Some fancy scanners are so complicated with software that they never get used. All their software wants to by pass systems you’ve already set up. A real pain. Got one of those. But I also have a great, very easy Canon scanner that is just a workhorse–no bells or whistles at all and no horrible learning curve.
^^^ Model number, please!
Canon Lide 100. Can’t be any easier than this. Actually I have two 'cause Office Depot had them for 25 bucks on Black Friday more than a couple years ago. Plug it in to a port and scan. Nothing fancy in way, shape or form. No slide stuff, no negative stuff, nada but scan.
Like I said I have another great scanner with bells and whistles but I’m always looking for the darn “how to” manual and way more often opt for this one. My dad says “I’m too old for learning curves” and I would laugh but now I totally get it.
Having a box of old unlabeled photos sent to an aunt thousands of miles away and returned with only some people identified was my motivation to label all photo prints. With the ease of digital photography and Picasa I haven’t been labeling most. At least they’re organized chronologically. When we were moving I made myself go through all of the photos that hadn’t made the album cut and discarded them. I still have negatives- son gets to discard those. I put numbers on successive albums- 1, 2… because otherwise who knows which came first. Don’t get rid of scanned photos- who knows if digital formats in use now will be readable for future generations (either technology could be advanced or another dark age…). We finally put VCR tape/digital material on DVDs- a walk through son’s childhood from when we got our first video camera when he was one. Haven’t gotten around to video editing and may never. It is interesting how much footage has been taken on vacations and never bothered with again.