<p>Lastminutemom, I came across your comment about photos on the computer while reading the “Bag A Week Club” thread (a great one, by the way!) So, I’m starting this new thread hoping others who have a good system of going through years of digital photos and what to do with them! </p>
<p>This Christmas, a friend gifted me with a photo book of our families’ summer cruise. I think making photo books would be a great idea but I have to get organized first!</p>
<p>I have a bunch of matching photo boxes on shelves in an antique cupboard. When you open the cupboard doors, it looks very neat. They aren’t in any particular order, though. Lots of them could just be discarded. There are lots of duplicates.</p>
<p>I did photo albums for the early years, but they haven’t held up too well. Friends have been making the photo books. I tried it for Christmas. I thought I might do a series. My kids didn’t seem too interested. I guess if I could get the boxes organized, chronologically and maybe by theme, they could do whatever they want with them in the future.</p>
<p>I do think I’ll do some sort of generational photo book for the hypothetical future grandchildren. And maybe write some text to go with it. It might make a nice companion volume to the imaginary family histories written by the great greats.</p>
<p>I don’t know what to do now. I feel like the album a year worked well for us, although I should probably scan the older photos to maintain their quality. Now I just have flash drives labeled with the years - 2 years on each mostly. I don’t know if the flash drives will degrade or if I’m better off to keep CDs.</p>
<p>While I’m also concerned with photo storage, I really want to be able to organize photos to print in a photo book so my kids can enjoy them now! We had so much fun looking through the photo book of our summer cruise that my friend gave us. </p>
<p>On my list is also scanning old prints and organizing. I’d like to develop a workable plan before I feel overwhelmed and put this project aside (again).</p>
<p>I organize my photos on Picasa which also lets me edit photos (simple stuff such as cropping and retouches, etc) but it wont let me share or order prints directly. I have to search for my photo on my computer (I don’t always label every photo). I have a backlog of photos I’d like to have printed. Any suggestions? What works for you?</p>
<p>alh, the kids won’t be interested in photos til much later. I know I didn’t become so sentimental til I had kids of my own.
I think about how my mom had to decide who got which pictures (pre-digital age). There were four kids in my H’s family and his mom gave most of the family photos to his sisters because she figured the guys wouldn’t want them anyway. :(</p>
<p>OK, dumb question:</p>
<p>How do you scan photos?</p>
<p>I am interested in the answer, too. I’ve been either sending them to my brother or getting it done by a very nice lady working at the photo kiosk at the local drugstore. My impression is that it would take a different kind of printer than we own and since we have to wait for one of our children to be home to set up any electronics I haven’t really investigated further.</p>
<p>confession: once I tried to scan a photo with our printer and it ran it out of ink and confused it all up in other ways, too. Now I just leave well enough alone.</p>
<p>Our printer does scan, but I doubt if that’s “photo quality.”</p>
<p>Yeah - and how does it get into the computer?</p>
<p>^^^ You print it out, roll up the piece of paper, and stick it in the USB port. ;)</p>
<p>But seriously: Whenever we scan something, we can save it to anywhere on our hard drive (or, I suppose, any removable drive) that we wish. So one could scan a photo and save it to one’s “pictures” library.</p>
<p>“But seriously…” ^^ - right, that is what I was trying to do. Not successful so far.</p>
<p>Quicker than scanning- I take a photo of the original photo with my iphone. Just make sure you have good natural light and no reflection. I then crop out the background and auto enhance through iphoto on my phone. The quality is as good as I need.</p>
<p>So - if someone decided to buy a new electronic device to deal with photo organization: new printer or an iphone?</p>
<p>My all in one printer/scanner is capable of scanning multiple pictures at one time - I can put several photos on the scanner bed, and as long as there is space between them the computer will recognize each photo as a separate item and create a separate scan file for each. It’s still going to take a LONG time to scan photos, but not nearly as long as if I had to do them one at a time! Now if I could just figure out a good way to sort and label the years worth of digital photos already on my computer…</p>
<p>Good question. It used to be that a picture of a picture was lower in quality but don’t know if that’s true with the new phones that have high resolution on their cameras.
I have a $50 hp all-in-one printer/copier/scanner. It is connected to my computer in the traditional way - one printer cable. To scan on my particular printer, I lay the photo on the glass (flat top with a lid that lifts like a typical copier) , open paint on my computer, choose scan from camera or printer, then choose quality, then click scan. The computer scans the photo and it instantly shows on my screen. I can then “save as” and name it and put it in my pictures folder.</p>
<p>I can address scanning photos, … organizing,not so much.</p>
<p>DH bought a ScanSnap scanner. It does photo’s beautifully and fast. We have an older flatbed scanner printer and this ScanSnap is SO much better. It is FAST! Scans to .jpg or PDF. </p>
<p>edit to add, just drop the photo into the scanner, much easier than flat bed. Will only do 9 inches wide, but will do long long ones. Nice for some of the legal pages I had to scan for Mom.</p>
<p>My H scanned boxes and boxes (as in shipping carton size) boxes of photos. The worst pain was taking many photos out of the folder things I had put them it. Just scan scan scan. At least they are saved and not degrading.</p>
<p>As I said, organizing, not so much . all those scans are in the order he scanned them. Nicely labeled box1, box2, box3 … Although he did sometimes label a picture so that instead of scan144.jpg it was dsat4.jpg. That just took too long though. We are talking 1000’s of pics. Now they are on a disk, the disk is backed up in the safety deposit box so that if/when a fire hits, at least I’ll still have box1 of my kid’s baby pics. </p>
<p>He also scanned many of my Mom’s old photos, double sided to get the notes on the back, courtesy of Grandma who is the only person who ever labelled a picture… now I am not even sure which is which of my two kids! (almost anyway). Mom can’t remember much of anything so I am really grateful to Grandma. Once the pics are all scanned (there are more to do), I can pop in a CD and send them to cousins, kids, whatever.</p>
<p>In theory, I would love to do the photo books, but in reality, a CD is going to be as good as it gets.</p>
<p>Oh, and my picasa shares pics, so I don’t know who or why there was a problem with that. Maybe you should look further into your version of picasa and see how to share?</p>
<p>I am a scrapbooker and organize and edit my digital pics with computer software. I really like Memory Manager by Creative Memories but it is no longer available. I am sure there are many other software programs. When photos are imported they are sorted by date. You can then manually sort by person, place, event, etc. Old printed photos are a little more time consuming. I started by sorting by year or event (Christmas, Easter, birthdays, etc). You can always go back and make smaller files. I place the photos in archival sort boxes. They can also be scanned and placed in the software folders. I think saving the pics in a portable hard drive is the way to go so you don’t have them all on your computer in case it crashes.</p>
<p>If you save to CD-- use a CD-R rather than CD-RW and do not use a DVD. The DVD is supposedly good for 25-50 years but a regular CD-R is estimated to last about 100 years (has to do with the actual technology of how the info is burned to the disc). Flash drives are estimated to last about 100 years. The burning question is what is the next technology that eliminates the need for CDs and flashdrives…
If you want hard copies of pictures for archival purposes–don’t use your home computer for printing. Send them (electronically) to a photo service. The photo paper, inks and process are far superior to what you have available (as well as cheaper in most cases).</p>
<p>Hmm, I may be overlooking the share button on Picasa that will let me upload photos to Costco (or maybe I should be in Costco photos trying to upload from Picasa?). I’ll look into that tonight.</p>
<p>Re: scanning prints. I’m looking for a photo scanner myself. Like some of you, I’ve taken pictures of the prints with my iPhone with pretty good results, especially old black and whites.</p>
<p>I use Adobe Photoshop which has some great organizational tools. Best way to go is digital organization. I can file a picture under person, chronological, event or any other thing I dream up–one designation or 10.
For hard copies–they stay in photo boxes, in chronological order with a label on the front telling me what’s in there and the year/trip/event etc.</p>