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!

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

 In November and December of this year I wrote a 4 part series of articles for Legacy Family Tree on Organizing, Scanning, Preserving and Sharing Family Photos. They may be helpful for any of my readers wanting to create some structure and organization out of a mess of family photographs! 

I've followed my own advice and made giant leaps in my own chaos of shoeboxes of stored family photos and old photo albums tucked into corners of the attic.
 
In "10 Easy Steps to Organizing Family Photos" Part I and  Part II I will walk you step by step through easy ways to sort your family photographs and get them ready for scanning. Graphics such as the one I created below add a visual component to aid in following the steps.

 

In "10 Steps to Scanning, Preserving and Sharing Your Photos" Part 1 and Part 2 I explain resolution, file format, types of scanners and other details you need to know before you begin to scan those treasured photographs.

One of the first steps is  deciding on a file structure on your computer. Screenshots of my own directory setup should help in following my suggestions

You've probably heard of meta data but might not know what it is. That is all explained in my series and screenshots of using meta data will be helpful.

So don't wait - take a bit of time before the New Year and add organizing and scanning your family photographs to your 2016 New Year's Resolutions

My Latest Toy - the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 Scanner

This is my latest toy - a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500. It's an automatic document feeder scanner and what makes it special is these abilities:

• Can connect iX500 to computer via Wi-Fi
• Can forward scanned data to a mobile device via Wi-Fi
• Scans to Evernote, Google Docs and Dropbox
• Scans in duplex

It comes with some bundled software and works with both Mac and Windows computers. It will scan up to 600 dpi in colour or greyscale and 1200 dpi in black and white if you need the best quality resolution but at the lesser dpi it is crystal clear.

Most sizes are recognized and easily scanned - business cards, postcards, letters, legal size paper, letter size paper, receipts of all sizes, etc

If you use the included Carrier Sheet you can also scan fragile items such as photographs or oversize items. I haven't tried this yet but I plan to!

You can connect to your computer via WiFi or a USB port. When scanning you can insert 25 pages at one time into the feeder, press the scan button and in seconds the scans are on your computer. Then you choose where/how you want the file(s) to go - to a folder convert to a searchable PDF file, to email, to a mobile device, to Evernote, to Google Docs or to Dropbox. It is super easy and fast to set up and I am having a wonderful time scanning items and sending them to various locations.

So far I've scanned receipts and other personal papers. My next goal is to scan genealogy documents and other miscellaneous records. Going completely paperless will not be possible but I do plan on reducing our paper clutter as much as possible.  The ScanSnap is going to aid me in that goal.

I am also going to scan the original ledger books that my husband and I have collected over the years. We had intended to transcribe the pages and put them on his website Ancestors At Rest, but the task has proven too overwhelming. 

3rd basket of discarded papers in 2 days

Rather than have the books sit in our basement gathering dust and probably be thrown out at some point, we are going to carefully cut the pages out and scan them as searchable PDF files, then upload those files to the website. That way other genealogists and descendants will be able to access these one-of-a-kind books.

We feel no need to preserve the actual physical integrity of these old ledger books as the important part is to make the contents accessible. And we do not have the physical space to continue storing the books, some of which are quite large (and heavy)

You can get Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 Scanner for PC and Mac (PA03656-B005) at Amazon.com or any of the big stores but Amazon seems to sell it cheaper than many others. In fact right now it is on sale for $409.99

This does not replace my flatbed scanner or my beloved Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner. They are different tools for different purposes.