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March 9, 2020

Don't Put it Off! Organize and Scan Your Family Photos

I just finished sorting & labelling hundreds of my family pics back to 1867 because I'm preparing for a huge scanning project. 

My first task was to take the photos out of the archival boxes in which I stored them. 

Several years ago I wrote a series of blog posts as I started a huge project to sort and organize all my photos into groups and store them in special boxes I purchased online.  You can read about those efforts here:

Organizing Family Photos: Creating a Plan

Organizational Project Part 2 - Family Diaries

Organization Project Part 3 - Digitizing Family Slides

Organizational Project Part 4 - Sorting the Family Photographs

Organizational Project Part 5: The Domino Effect in an Organization Project

Organizational Project Part 6: Ready for the Second Sort of Photographs!

Easy Steps to Organizing, Scanning, Preserving & Sharing Family Photos


These are some of the early WW1 to 1960s era family photos I sorted and labelled yesterday.

What a job! But what a great feeling to finally note names, dates, and locations on all pictures. What are you doing with your family photos? If you are tackling this kind of project please remember to use pencil to notate on the back of the photos so as not to damage them.

I'll talk about the actual scanning process in another blog post so stay tuned!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is one huge project I have ahead of me, too. At least I made a start last fall. I really does take months to get through this! Good for you!
Judy Stickney

Sandra Cambronne said...

Wow, impressive! What do you do with old photos with nothing written on the back and you don't know who they are. My mother-in-law has a suitcase full of such pictures. They could be family, or they could be friends or neighbors. Do you keep them with the hopes that someday someone will recognize someone?