Digital Decluttering: Photo Management (Premium)

Three weeks ago, I wrote about my latest attempt to scan in our old photos, distribute them to various online services, and then destroy the originals. Since then, there’s been a whirlwind of activity: Thanks to a reader suggestion, I moved to a high-speed photo scanner, and quickly blew through all of the 21 photo albums-worth of photos I still had remaining. Since that, I’ve started working through the boxes and boxes I have of loose photos, which include photos still in envelopes (which are well-labeled, somewhat labeled, or not labeled at all) plus a surprising number of literally loose photos that will require some work identifying.

There’s a bit more to it than that, as well: We have other documents and items that need to be scanned in some way too, like birth certificates, old passports, ticket stubs, greeting cards, kids’ drawings, and much more. But the basic idea is the same for all of this stuff: It needs to be digitized, organized, uploaded, and then managed in some way. This content also needs to be enjoyed, at least occasionally, too.

Hopefully, your own photo scanning efforts will be less troublesome than mine. I’m about halfway through what I’ll call the loose photos as I write this, and I’ve scanned in over 7,500 photos so far. In the course of doing this, I also discovered older scans from 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2017 that needs to be sorted and managed as well, and there are almost 3,000 scans in those collections. I figure I have another 2500-3000 scans to go, at least. So the total job here, if you will, should land somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 scans.

This requires a clear understanding of the end game. And some serious organization.

My goals are simply stated. I intend to scan in everything---photos and whatever else; let’s just call them photos for simplicity’s sake---and then destroy/throw away virtually all of it. I will “tag” every single photo with at least a date, and that date will be as correct as is possible. I will then upload the photos to at least two online services, and copy them to my NAS.

The details of how I’m achieving this are, of course, a bit more complicated. So let’s step through this.

The scanning itself is simple enough, and the high-speed scanner, as its name implies, makes this process a lot more efficient. It’s not perfect: The scanner software will auto-create filenames and tags with the month and year of photos, but not the day, plus a subject/title. And you can optionally create a subfolder for each batch of photos, which I do.

Here’s how I organize the scans as they happen.

I use a separate folder for each event. I prefer to use a naming convention like date - event (for example “1988-03-07 Jon's birthday”) so that the events are alphabetized, and thus ordered by date, with a year folder (1988). That’s not what the scanner software creates, not exactly. Instead, it will create a folder called “1988_March_Jon’s_...

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