Q: Hi Amy!  I need help with photo organizing – mounds and totes of photos!!!  I have really let this job go for way too long and now it is almost overwhelming for me to begin!  Now I also have Mom’s piles of photo albums, along with her genealogy research, to maintain for safekeeping.  So I surely could use some suggestions.  I want to be able to leave all of this to my two sons so they will be able to share it all with their families.  What do you suggest?

A: My first suggestion for photo organizing is to take them out of any albums that may be causing further damage (non acid-free albums). It’s better to have them in a plastic tote than in a damaging album like the old magnetic albums.

Second, purge any blurry photos, duplicates and negatives.  Try to reduce the number of photos from one event to a small-ish amount. Every photo you keep means an expense of scanning, time spent figuring out what to do with it & labeling it. Be very selective! Quality over quantity. 🙂 I’d rather have 20 great photos of my childhood than 3 big boxes of poor ones.

Third, sort them by date or category – depending on what you’re going to do with them. If you are planning to give them to the kids now, sort them by child & box them to send/give. If you’re going to do a project or scan them first, sort by event and/or date. Try to get them into chronological order as much as possible (at least a general timeline).

I highly recommend scanning the photos. If you’re planning to scan, either invest in a quality scanner, visit a Kodak scanning kiosk or utilize a photo scanning company (like FotoBridge or ScanMyPhotos.com). The kiosk is a do-it-yourself option where you stand there and scan photos of various sizes. A scanning company is going to have strict instructions about how to organize/package the photos before you send them off. You may want to consider sending off all of the 4×6 and 3×5 sizes and scanning the larger ones at a kiosk.

After scanning, I recommend using Picasa. I use it to organize all of my digital photos & it’s a FREE download from Google. You can tag all of the photos with names, dates, locations also. It adds it into the digital data for that photo, so the info won’t be lost.

You could create photo books, do digital scrapbooking or simply burn all photos to a CD to give to relatives.

Regarding the genealogy research, I would also scan that and keep it with the photos. I’m assuming it’s paper, so you could scan it with a regular flatbed scanner or use a copy machine scanner. If you have digital copies of it, keep it in a folder with or near the photos so you can find it easily. You can also burn copies of it onto a CD or DVD and/or put the scanned documents into a photo book.

UPDATE!! Lasting Order is now offering Photo Organizing & Scanning Services! Check it out HERE.