Does looking at your unorganized photo collection may you feel like you are trying to navigate the Amazon river without a Jungle Cruise captain?

All through the month of September, The Picture Org (anizer), in association with The Photo Managers, is presenting a daily tip to help you get motivated to organize, identify, and save your photos for both today and the future. Do you want more than just some quick ideas?

Once your pictures are organized, you need to protect them. You will spend a lot of time organizing and sorting your original prints. Once you are done, you’ll want to protect and store them in a way that gives them the best chance to survive the ages.

Scanning (or digitizing) your pictures is the first step. Our prints and photos all suffer from the risk of loss due to fire, flood, water damage, rodents, mold, mildew, or just general fading. I have seen many photos from the early 1900s that have almost faded out of existence. (I’ve also been able to restore many of them, but that is for another day.)

What do you want to happen to your pictures after you have passed?

You have a lifetime of photos, but what will happen to them when you are no longer here?

If you could only save 100 photos…Which ones would you choose? Which photos are the most special to you?

Which photos bring out the most memories?

Which photos bring out the most emotions?

How would it feel to easily find and share your photos?

You’ve found your photos, but now what? You need a plan. This week, we’ll explore creating a photo legacy.

Before you do anything else, decide what to do with your duplicate pictures. One of the great sales pitches for photoshops in the ‘80s and ‘90s was double (and sometimes triple) prints for the cost of one set of prints. This sounded like a great deal at the time! We could share the prints with our friends and relatives, while still having one set for ourselves!

Do you have 100, 1,000, 10,000, more? Knowing how many you have helps you figure out the scope of your photo project. Here are some industry standards we use when estimating photo counts -

When you start organizing your photos, you will find out that most of them don’t have dates or events conveniently written on them. To help jog your memory, start making a timeline of major events in your family.