Digital Decluttering: Photos (Premium)

Like some of you, I have an incredible number of paper-based photos that need to be digitized. It’s a daunting, thankless task that I return to again and again. And then give up on, again and again.

As I noted in Paul’s Tech Makeover: Here’s to an Even Smarter 2019 (Premium), I’m giving it another go. And yes, I will almost certainly not “finish” this task anytime soon, let alone this year. But I’m going to try. Again.

To understand the problem, you need to understand the sheer weight of the problem.

I became interested in photography in the early-to-mid 1990’s. Noting this, my father gave me what was, for the day, I really nice SLR camera with a variety of lenses. And off I went. I was an avid photographer from day one, and collected my photos in neatly organized albums for the next ten years or more. After I got married in 1990, we moved to Phoenix, where we lived for several years, and eventually had our first child, in 1998.

But between 1993 or so and 1998, I stopped organizing my photos, so they’re all in envelopes, often with little in the way of date/location information, in boxes. But once the kids came along, we switched to digital cameras somewhere around 2000-2001, and made sure that those photos were well-organized on hard drives and, eventually, in online services. In 2013, with the release of the Nokia Lumia 1020, we switched permanently to our smartphones for photos. Those pictures are all backed up automatically to two online services now.

It’s thirty years later.

And my photos are all over the place. Some are nicely organized in my NAS, in OneDrive, and in Google Photos. Some are automatically backed up to those services from my phones, with geolocation data. So that’s all good.

But I have many photos—from ~1983 to ~1999–only in paper form, in albums and in envelopes, all packed into boxes that have been moved, from house to house, between Canton, Massachusetts, various places in and around Phoenix, Arizona, then back to Massachusetts, where we bought and lived in two other homes, and then more recently to Pennsylvania. Some of these boxes, literally, were labeled when we moved to Phoenix in 1993.

And when I say boxes, I mean boxes. Several boxes. Several big boxes. Daunting is indeed the right word.

In the past, I made some headway from time-to-time with the photos that are in albums. These are/were generally well-documented, with written descriptions of the exact dates and locations of events, plus other information. So this was, in some ways, the low-hanging fruit: I would pull the photos out of the albums, scan them and save them using descriptive file names, and then store them in folders with the right date (like “1993-04-01 – Drive to Washington D.C.” or whatever). Then I held on to the originals because, you know. They’re the originals.

What I didn’t do for many of those photos, aside from destroying the originals, was tag them with the correct date/time. Instead, these photos appear—to services like OneDrive and Google Photos, and to photo editing apps—to have been taken on the day/time at which they were scanned. (In metadata terms, these are noted as “date created” and “date modified”.) When I was just organizing my photos in folders on hard drives, this didn’t matter. Now it does.

So more recently, I began scanning photos again, with three goals in mind: Make sure that new scans were properly tagged with the correct “date taken” information, destroy the originals, and then at some vague time in the future go through the photos online and correct the old scans.

Again, daunting.

Daunting—and time-consuming—enough that I always drop off. But every once in a while, I pull out the scanner again and get to work.

The bit about destroying the originals probably caused an involuntary shudder in some. But the one thing I’ve come to understand is that this mountain of photos is both a real-world weight and a more figurative weight on my conscience. They’re in boxes, literally, so it’s not like we’re enjoying them in any way. They need to go. And doing that will make us more mobile, which will make the next move—and there will almost certainly be future moves—easier and even less expensive. It will help us downsize.

So, as noted, I’m at it again. We’ll see how long this lasts. But to mix things up, and to make some a different kind of headway with the boxes of photos, I decided to start with the loose photos first. So last weekend, I went through the photo and “to scan” boxes in the cellar, dragged them upstairs into my office, and started looking through the pictures I probably haven’t seen, in some cases, for as long as 25 years. It’s been interesting: There’s a weird gap in our digital photo collection, specifically from the 1990s, and these photos pretty much fill it. So digitizing those has felt like an accomplishment of sorts.

Going forward, I’ll probably mix and match between organized photo albums and the disorganized loose photos, just to keep it moving. I have a little workflow of sorts in which scanned photos are labeled as a such an placed in a different box to be destroyed only after I know that they are all correctly tagged (or as correctly as possible) and uploaded to the NAS and those two online services.

Tagging the photos is interesting. There are a variety of tools for this, and you can even use the Properties dialog in Windows for this purpose if all you want to do is change the “date taken” tag. I like the way Photoshop Elements does this (and in bulk) but I would also like to add geo-location data. And to do that, I apparently need to update to the newest versions of the product (which costs $100): The version I’m using, Photoshop Elements 15, no longer supports this functionality. So I’ll need to figure that out.

Anyway, it’s a mess. And all I can do is keep plowing forward. Until I lose interest, drift off, and forget about this again for another several months or year or whatever. I can, and probably will, also experiment with services that do this for a fee, including negative scanning. But I want to see how much I can get through on my own first.

Here we go again.