When to Digitize Your Loose Photos
Once you’ve gathered and organized your piles, boxes, and stashes of loose photos, how do you decide if and what to digitize? (If you haven’t done this first step, see our last post!)
Revisit your end goal – what is the true purpose of the photo project? To share, preserve or show at an event? This will define the scope of which photos to digitize. Remember, you can always choose to digitize in batches and handle more later.
Here are some things to think about when deciding to digitize some or all of your photos:
- Condition of the photos: prioritize key ones that have deterioration, fading, or physical damage.
- Upcoming events or projects: which photos will tell the best stories? Is the event a reunion, family celebration, or milestones? Planning early for these will save last minute stress.
- Storage and preservation concerns: environmental factors such as moisture, pests, sunlight will damage photos over time.
- Emotional or sentimental value: those photos that hold a lot of emotional value for you or family are good to preserve for future generations.
How?
There are many services out there to make digitizing easy. Services include mail-away, local photo labs, and professional photo organizers. Things to ask of any photo service: Is the work handled locally? Do they offer high resolution? Can they add filenames?
Then What?
Protect: If you do digitize, next you get to decide what to do them! Again, this is a good time to revisit your end goal. First step is to store all the files in one place – you can think of this as your digital hub, then create a backup, in the cloud or on an external hard drive, of all the files.
Organize: Similar to how you sorted the original prints, you can create digital folders and use file naming to sort and organize. One of the big benefits of digitizing is the expanded ability to sort in different ways for different needs. The more info you put into a file name, the more easily you’ll be able to find specific photos.
Share: Options for storing and sharing include: printed photo books, shared files in the cloud, a personal family website, share photos shared via a flash drive/memory stick, digital photo frames…
Feeling motivated yet? Imagine that your photos have been selected and preserved in a way that you can actually find and share them! It will give you peace of mind AND create space in your home.
By the way, once you have the digital versions AND have backed them up, it’s OK to let the original prints go.
