How We’re Organizing Our Digitized Photos

I’m honestly a little surprised by all the interest in my photo digitization project, but we continue to field questions about how I’ve organized our old family photos. So here are answers to the most often-asked burning questions about exactly how we sorted, organized, and backed up our photos throughout the digitizing process.

I won’t claim to have ALL of the answers (a photo-organizing expert like Miss Freddy might!), because there’s been some trial and error along the way for me. But below are the steps I wish I’d followed from the very beginning. There’s also a “rapid fire FAQ” at the end.

Why Digitize Your Old Photos

To recap, our goals for this project were threefold:

1. Safeguard memories: Create digital backups of photos to protect against loss or damage
2. Free up space: Convert bulky old photo albums into slimmer photobooks (twice as many photos can be stored in literally 1/4 of the space)
3. Pare down photos: Get rid of pics that aren’t worth saving (doubles, blurry, etc)

We’ve definitely achieved all three of these goals, but this post primarily focuses on #1: the process of sorting, organizing, and backing things up. And hopefully Goals #2 and #3 are pretty self-explanatory!

Photo Digitization: A Step-By-Step Process

You might think: what could the steps possibly be? Just scan and save, right? That’s what I thought! But merging and organizing multiple albums, loose prints, and digital photos benefits from a more systematic approach. Here’s an overview:

1. Assess Your Stash
2. Define Your Scope
3. Buy Supplies
4. Create Main Backup Folders
5. Transfer Digital Photos
6. Sort Physical Photos
7. Scan & Save In Batches
8. Back Up To Another Location

Now let’s break these down so this goes from being ONE GIANT PROJECT to a few smaller and doable steps.

1. Assess Your Stash

To begin, take stock of where and in what format(s) your old photos currently exist. It may help to gather them all in one place or simply make a list on paper. Potential formats include:

• Photo albums
• Boxes or piles of loose photos
• Photos on display (framed, pin boards, on the fridge)
• Film negatives or slides
• Digital photos saved on devices (your computer, phones, the cloud)
• Digital photos saved on SD cards, CDs, flash drives, etc
• Digital photos uploaded to sites like Facebook, Snapfish, etc

I started our project simply thinking about our physical albums, but realized we had many digital photos and loose photos that overlapped the same years. Locating them all and listing them before you start makes things a lot easier. And your new photobooks will be even more comprehensive than your old albums!

2. Define Your Scope

Step #1 might be overwhelming, so don’t be shy about limiting the scope of your project. Maybe start with just one album, one year, or one event (wedding, vacation, etc) for now. Starting small also lets you figure out your preferred workflow and organizational system on a smaller scale. You can also break down the project into bite-sized tasks, such as:

• Getting all the photos into one location (Step #1 above) – be sure to check drawers and closets for old boxes, CDs, etc
• Discarding unwanted photos – we flipped through our old albums and tossed extraneous or blurry photos (27 bad photos of fireworks do not need to be scanned!).
• Sending out negatives, slides, and unscannable formats for digitization – try a service like this
• Sorting prints chronologically – there’s more about this in step #6 below
• Scanning prints – and save the organizing for later

You can also limit your scope by excluding some photos entirely. For us, we limited our scope to photos taken before 2009, which is when we started printing annual photobooks.

4. Create Your Main Backup Folders

One thing I wish I’d done differently was to establish main backup folders before scanning anything. Having one central spot for everything will make life easier as you lay out photobooks or create backups.

Setting up main backup folders is also a good time to decide how you want to organize your photos. Most people will sort by date, but you may want special folders for events (weddings, vacations), people (grandparents, newborns), or locations (first homes, time abroad).

I eventually made a main backup folder on my computer, but you could also do this directly in a cloud account like iCloud or Google Drive. Here’s what mine looks like:

Mine is called “Photo Scans” because I wasn’t thinking about existing digital photos when I started. Because of that, my scans (i.e. ’80s and ’90s photos) ended up in different folders than my existing digital photos (i.e. early 2000s photos). By the time I realized my mistake, I’d already started making photobooks and couldn’t combine my folders without unlinking the file locations in my photobook software. Do as I say, not as I do!

A note about filenames

I also chose a consistent filename format for all photos in this project. This helped me quickly identify which files I’d processed and which I hadn’t. To do this, I used the “Rename” function on my MacBook to rename files in bulk. Just Ctrl + click on your Mac (right-click on a PC) to get the menu shown below. Fill in your preferred naming system (I used a Person-Year-Month– format, like John-1981-11) and hit enter.

We didn’t know the exact month for every photo, so we just used our best guess.

5. Transfer Digital Photos

I know this project is primarily about scanning old photos, but hear me out: if any of those prints already exist digitally somewhere, transfer them to your main backup folders first! Think photos from those pre-smartphone early-2000s digital cameras that the kids now call “retro.” We found digital photo files on several CDs, on a backup drive, and even in an old Flickr account.

Those digital files will be better quality than your scans AND they should have the original metadata, which tells your computer the exact date the photo was taken. That makes sorting them into the correct folders faster and more precise.

Trust me, it stings to find these files after you just spent an hour scanning and sorting prints of the very same pictures… which happened to me. Lesson learned: look first, scan later.

5. Sort Physical Photos

Now let’s turn to your photo albums and loose photo prints. Before you fire up the scanner, here are some ways to prep your prints for faster and easier scanning:

Remove prints from albums

If you’re not keeping those old bulky albums, take the photos out and put them into a pile for speedier scanning. If you are planning to keep the album as is, just remove, scan, and immediately put photos back one at a time.

Copy captions

If the album has important dates, names, or locations written beside a photo, I suggest rewriting that info onto the back of the print. I’ll share how to use this later, but for now, this step allows you to discard the album without losing that info.

Pare down

Discard any unwanted or unneeded photos now (duplicates, poor quality, things you don’t care about, etc). You’ll have less to scan and fewer files to sort later. Win-win!

Put prints in order

Arrange your prints to match your main backup folders – such as chronologically. If you’re lucky, your albums are already sorted this way. If you’re like us, you also have a big pile of loose photos, many without dates on the back. *sigh*

It took me quite a while to sort our prints into a loose chronological order, but I still found it much easier to do before scanning. I made piles for each year on the floor (again, matching my main backup folders) and used whatever info I could to make my best guess about where each photo belonged in a timeline. Some had dates or captions on the back. Some I knew from memory (that trip was from 1998!). Some I tried to cross-reference haircuts or outfits to photos with known dates. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough for our purposes. Also, you kinda feel like a detective.

Doing all of this sorting and prep upfront left me with ready-to-scan piles that I could blaze through without much thought or effort. This meant I could even sneak in quick scanning sessions when I only had 10 or 15 minutes to spare.

6. Scan & Save In Batches

You can watch the video below to see how easy it is to scan with the Plustek ePhoto Scanner. Just be sure to adjust the ICC Profile in the Preferences menu first (as described in this post) to spare you from manually adjusting each scan for color & brightness. Trust me on this: it’s a very worthwhile detail!

Note: You can also view this video on YouTube.

The ePhoto software allows you to scan up to 60 photos before you must export/save and start a new batch. However, I preferred to export every time I finished a group from the same month or event. Even if a month only had 3 or 4 photos, I would export them as a “batch” because it makes file-naming easier.

To be clear, here’s what that process looks like:

1. Working through your chronological pile of photos, scan all the photos from a particular month, up to 60 (for example, all photos from March 1982).
2. Then, export those by clicking the disk icon in the ePhoto software (circled above).
3. You’ll be prompted to select an export destination. Select the appropriate year (1982) in your main backup folders. NOTE: It will NOT prompt you to provide a file name in this step, which is why I prefer to rename them in bulk after export.
4. Once exported, a window with those freshly saved files should pop up. Highlight those files and use the “Rename” tool (found by Ctrl + clicking on a Mac) to apply a better filename to the batch. Here’s where I used that Person-Year-Month format, like John-1982-03. Sometimes I added an event name too, like John-2000-06-Prom or John-2004-05-Graduation.
5. You’re done, move on to the next batch of photos!

Repeat this process until all of your old photo prints have been digitized and saved into their appropriate folders.

7. Back Up To Another Location

For files as important as these photos, I prefer to have them saved in multiple places. Maybe that’s overkill, but knowing that I have multiple backups made it easier to part with some of the physical copies. So for now, I’ve put my files in these 3 places:

1. On my laptop’s hard drive*
2. On an external hard drive
3. On the cloud, like iCloud, Google Drive, or Dropbox

*Keeping files on my laptop is mostly to make creating photobooks simpler. I find it easier when they’re saved on my computer. Once I print the photobooks, I’ll probably free up the laptop space since I’ll still have them on an external hard drive & on the cloud.

I don’t back up my files after every little scanned batch of photos. I usually wait for a natural stopping point – like when I’m done scanning for the day or have finished a whole year/album. Obviously, the goal here is to safeguard your efforts (and your memories!) in case of a computer crash, device loss, or cloud failure.

A More Visual Backup Option

You may also want to upload your scans to an app like Apple Photos or Google Photos. You know, those places your phone is probably storing your current photos!

These apps make it easier to see and enjoy your old photos (imagine that!), even right from your phone. Plus, you can leverage their search tools (like facial, text, and object recognition) to, for example, search “dog” to find pics of your childhood pet.

However, I’ll offer two words of caution about using Apple or Google Photos for this type of digitization project.

Drawback #1: They aren’t great with dates

Both Apple and Google display photos chronologically using the “date taken” embedded in the file (aka: metadata). This works great for existing digital photos, but not scanned prints. Apple and Google have no way of knowing when it was originally photographed, and they also won’t care what folder or filename you saved it under. Instead, they will sort them by the date you scanned the print. That means all of your careful sorting may go right out the window when you upload to these services.

There is a solution, however. You can adjust the date of your uploads, even selecting multiple photos to fix at once. To do this, I suggest uploading scans in small batches (just like you scanned them) so you can move an entire month or event together. It can be a tedious process, depending on how precise you want the dates to be.

Just keep in mind that editing dates this way does NOT change the file’s metadata. So if you ever export these photos back to your computer (to make a photobook, for example), you’ll likely lose any sorting you did within Apple or Google Photos. Frustrating, I know! They will preserve filenames, though, which is why naming everything with a Year-Month-Event.jpg format can be useful.

Drawback #2: Old and new pics might get mixed

Because of the metadata issue described above, your uploaded scans can easily get mixed with your recent photos. You might find old baby photos right next to that picture of the dog that you took this morning or the funny raccoon videos you downloaded at midnight. So if you’re not diligent about adjusting dates as you upload, you can end up with a tangled, time-warped mess when you’re trying to fix dates or print photobooks later.

For this reason, we kept ours completely separate. Since we already use iCloud for our iPhone photos, we uploaded all of our old photos to Google Photos. We even used two separate Google Photos accounts: uploading my old photos to mine, and Sherry’s to hers. It might seem crazy to put photos in 3 separate places, but it has really helped as we’re assembling our separate childhood photobooks.

What’s Next For Our Photos?

After we scanned and sorted everything, we moved on to two final tasks – both of which we’ve nearly completed:

Making Photobooks

Remember how Goal #2 is to replace our bulky albums with slimmer photobooks? We’ve already printed a bunch of replacement photobooks, allowing us to discard over 8 puffy albums so far!

We started making annual “Family Yearbooks” in 2009, when Sherry was first pregnant. But now we’ve got them going back to 2005 when we started dating, along with a photobook that’s devoted to our wedding and honeymoon, as well as some childhood photobooks for each of us. It has been a long time coming, and seeing them all finished and printed (and freeing up all that space) feels great.

Paring Down Our Prints

We did discard many photos during the sorting and scanning process (mostly duds and duplicates), but we’re hanging on to everything else until we’ve finished printing our photobooks. That way, we can reference info on the backs (remember how we copied captions out of the albums?) and reference our physical piles for the chronological order.

Now that our photobooks are done, we plan to pare down some more. The goal is to end up with just one or two decorative boxes that we can stack on a bookshelf full of our favorite older photos. That way we have our favorite originals handy for display, passing down, or just as “historical artifacts” of sorts. But there’s no need to save 1000+ printed photos from 15 years ago when we now have them arranged in a photobook (which is much easier to look through than endless boxes of random photos from different eras).

Photo Digitization FAQs

If the steps above were a lot to take in (believe me, I understand), here are some rapid-fire responses to some popular questions:

How much storage do I need to save my photos?

The 2,500 photos I’ve scanned using the Plustek take up 3.3 GB of disk space. That is very little by file storage standards. For reference, basic flash drives start at 8GB, Apple gives users 5GB of free storage, and Google offers 15GB free. Obviously, your personal needs will depend on how many photos and what resolution you’re scanning (see below). Existing photo files straight from a digital camera (aka: not your scans) may also be larger.

Are the scanned photos good enough quality to print or project on a screen?

By default, Plustek scans everything at 300 dpi (dots per inch), meaning your scans should reprint clearly at their original size. If you plan to enlarge or project your photos, you can change the Plustek setting to 600 dpi. This will slow down the scanning process and increase file sizes, but it will keep them clearer at larger sizes.

Keep in mind that anytime an image changes format or medium, it can lose quality. And any reprints or enlargements you order may be a print of a scan of a print of a film negative.

How much will it cost to store my photos?

This depends on how much storage you need and what storage you already own or pay for. We incurred no additional storage costs for this project because we already own an external hard drive (~$70) and already pay for 100GB of Google storage ($20/year). But you can also purchase smaller flash drives for under $10 or choose Apple’s 50GB plan, which is $0.99/month.

Other Family Photo Posts

To catch up on this digitization project or other information about how we store family photos, be sure to check out these posts below:

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