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 corr...