Over the course of my life, I’ve taken on two major photo preservation projects handling old family photos.

Whether you have boxes full of photo albums, stacks of loose photos or framed pictures from the past, this is how I would suggest handling them.

First, create a digital home for copies of your photos. For me the best option is Dropbox because you can not only create many folders and subfolders to share, but the annual cost is low for the sheer amount of files you can save.

Second, grab some of your photos and go through them to sort into Scan and Skip. For me, I skipped scanning all of the photos of trees, forests, cars and pets without humans. While it might have been cool for my grandma to take a picture of the river, I don’t need a copy.

Then, you can start scanning.

Setting up a routine around photo scanning is paramount. If you can, set aside a desk or corner of a table with your computer, scanner and photos. When I first started, I chose a TV series and would watch the season on DVD (no commercials!) while I scanned.

How to Scan:

1. Select a photo and lay it face down on the glass of the scanner. My scanner has a great feature where I can lay down 4-6 photos at once and all get scanned separate in one pass.
2. Close the lid of the scanner and hit “scan” and designate where the photo files will show up on the computer.
3. Remove the photos from the scanner and look on the back for any notes.
4. Rename the file on the computer with notes or add your own.
5. Put scanned photos in a safe box, back into albums or frames.
6. Repeat!

As you begin, think about a standardized way to name your photo files. For me, I didn’t have a lot of dates on photos so I always started with names going left to right in the photo with the date at the end.

So it might look like “Joe Smith, Mary Jones, John Winters – camping 1945.”

One benefit of this is that when you have hundreds or thousands of files most of the ones with Joe Smith will appear together. You could also search “John Winters” and find all the matching photos for your great uncle John.

While some people choose to send photos out to a service to be digitized, I chose not to for a few reasons. The first is cost, it can run into the hundreds of dollars based on how many photos you have. The second is you’d still have to sort, pick and label the photos after which is 60% of the work. The third reason is that I found it meditative to go back through history and preserve these family memories.

When I was doing my first big batch of photos, a colleague of mine mentioned he never had the time nor the tech skills to scan like I did. I suggested he “hire” his 12-yo daughter, who was too young to work a summer job, and pay her by the box. She would likely be watching tv throughout the summer anyway, might as well scan photos too. He loved the suggestion and his kids got through the whole family backlog in a few months.

While this is not a quick project, it’s an important one that you can chip away at, one step or photo at a time.