The idea for this post came from one of my prize students, Sally Hartman of the Norfolk Foundation. I helped Sally organize her desk almost a year ago for an article in the Virginian-Pilot. Sally took my suggestions and totally ran with them, and now she's organizing her family's photos.
I don't usually delve into home organizing stuff in this blog, but it occurred to me that many businesses probably have a lot of unidentified, unorganized, amorphous photos in their offices just like we do in our homes. Humans as a species tend to like to take photos, so this advice can apply to just about any situation.
Sally, like most people, has physical and digital photographs. Fortunately, the steps for organizing both kinds of photos are similar.
1. Find them all. For physical photos, this means digging out all the packets you got from the developer, the boxes, the albums, even that collage you might have made for a retirement party. For digital photos, this means checking the servers for images (and that can be a pretty monumental task unto itself) and asking everyone to check their hard drives for pics they might have taken on their own.
2. Toss the obvious "no"s. The standard is the same for physical and digital photos: any photo that's blurry, whose main subject is a thumb, whose subject matter could cause a divorce or lawsuit. If you have no earthly idea who anyone is in the photo, or what's going on, feel free to toss it if it's for your personal collection. If it's for the family or a business, hold onto the mystery photo and ask some folks if they know what its story is. If they're clueless as well, it can be tossed. Sally has done a great job of culling her photo herd, and has found a way to spread some joy, too: she's sent her friends pictures of their kids that she had taken.
3. Sort them out. How you sort your photos is up to you; as always, use a system that makes sense to you and that you'll understand and want to use in the future. Photos can be sorted by date, by event, by project or by location, or some combination thereof. Try to keep your categories specific enough to help you find things, but not so specific that they overwhelm you. Sally has done just this by organizing her family's photos into branches of the family, events and stages in her son's life.
4. Solve the mysteries. There's no point in keeping a photo unless you know who's in it and what they're doing. Find out who everyone in the photo is and what event was being commemorated on film. Once you've learned the who and what, you can make further decisions about what's worth keeping and what isn't.
5. Label them. Now that you know who's in what photo, hold on to that information by labeling the photo. If it's a physical print, you can use a special photo-labeling pen to write on the back. (Also, if you're using an album to store prints, make a separate label to go into the album.) If it's digital, use the file's metadata (usually found under "properties") to store the labeling info.
6. Store them. Physical photos should be stored in acid-free boxes and albums; you can find them online or in basic home stores. (Sally found some at Costco and TJ Maxx.) Hold on to the negatives of your photos in case you need reprints; if they have sentimental or other value, keep them in a fire-safe box or safety deposit box. Digital photos can be stored on your hard drive (which you back up regularly, right?) and online through photo-sharing sites.
7. Repeat as necessary. If you take a lot of photos, make a semi-regular date with yourself to organize and label them. The labeling part is the most time-sensitive; the longer you go without labeling a photo, the more likely you are to forget who's who and what's happening.
Photo organization can be a major undertaking, and if the photos have personal or family value, it can be an emotional process as well. So allow plenty of time for it, be gentle with yourself and give yourself rewards for every minor milestone.
What about you? Have you been on the photo-organizing trail like Sally has? What has and hasn't worked for you? Let me know in the comments!
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