The best way to organize your photos (from a professional)
From digital to physical, organize your memories.
Organizing photos is an incredibly emotional project. I have clients who had boxes upon boxes of old photos sitting in the attic because going through them was too monumental of a task. Even I have been a victim of hanging on to photos for too long!
When my grandmother passed away, she left me a box of her photos. It moved with me from apartment to apartment three times before I opened up the box to take a look at the photos. When I sorted through them, I realized I didn’t know who any of the people in the pictures were so I sat down with my dad to ask him.
After years of keeping these photos, he told me that these pictures weren’t of our family!!!! Somehow I had inherited a box of someone else’s stuff, and it took me years to go through them and figure it out.
I sat down with Ali Tenenbaum, a professional photo organizer and archivist, and asked her all of our burning questions about organizing photos so we can have our memories at our fingertips.
Where to start with photos
Ali says that the only way to start is to pick up a photo and start going through them one by one. There are no shortcuts to this, and you have to look through them all eventually!
When sorting through photos, organize them into piles based on which decade they were taken. If you don’t know the exact year, try to get as close as possible. Sorting through photos is like a puzzle– you can look at the number of candles in a birthday cake or what the fashion trends were to figure out the year!
Make sure you have a workspace that can fit all of your photos, and somewhere that you can leave your project overnight. Realistically, you will only be able to sort for an hour or two — it is an emotionally and physically taxing job!
When going through your photos, it is important to know what your end goal is. You don’t have to know the specifics just yet, but knowing whether you want to digitize your photos or scrapbook them will help shape your organizing progress!
You are allowed to throw photos away
Both Ali and I give you permission to throw out photos. If you have thousands of photos, there is no way you can keep and appreciate them all. If all of them are special, none of them are!
I guarantee you there are photos in there that are blurry, or of places and people that you have no idea who they are. It is okay to get rid of photos that you do not have a connection to.
If you have duplicates, only keep one of them. If you have 10 photos of the same moment, pick one or two that capture it best– you don’t need photos of your child looking one way and then the other!
You don’t have to keep old photos because they’re old. If they are antique photos, you can donate them to a historical society. You also don’t have to keep your slides or your negatives! If you want the photos, get them printed! There is no reason to save the smallest version of them. If you need to, create a “maybe” pile that you can go through later when you have a better idea of what you have.
If you are really struggling to let go, think about it this way: if you had all of these boxes sitting in the attic or the garage never being looked at, they might as well have been in the trash. You are not throwing away the memories, just the piece of paper.
Digitize printed photos
Choosing to digitize your photos is a great way to make sure everybody has access to them! There are plenty of places to get your photos digitized, such as Scan Cafe or even Costco. Something to note– digitizing your photos can be a pricey project, but once they are done it is inexpensive to make as many copies as you need.
There are also plenty of apps out there that let you scan your photos yourself, but it is time-consuming. Ali says you can do it yourself if you only have a few hundred photos, otherwise you will be stuck scanning for years.
You also have to organize your photos BEFORE you send them off to be digitized, otherwise you will be throwing money (and even more time) out the window.
Once digitized, upload them to the cloud and make at least one hard drive for your fireproof safe or a relative to hold. This ensures that you will always be able to have access to them.
Putting the photos in an album
You can have one album per year, MAYBE two. You can also choose to make dedicated albums to special events such as weddings or vacations. Getting a photo album is as simple as buying any 3-ring binder and inserting as many photo sleeves as you need.
This is Ali’s preferred method of making photo albums as it is affordable and it is flexible to your needs! It doesn't have quite the artistry of a custom-made album with individually mounted photos, but it’s fast, easy, perfect for families, and looks great.
If you find more photos, you can always add more sleeves. These albums are easy to flip through so you can easily see all of your memories.
Before you put your photos in the sleeves, label the back of the photos with any information that you have, such as dates or the names of who is in the photo. Use a pen that is photo-safe and you will be able to share those memories with generations to come!
Decluttering photos on your phone and computer
Are you able to go through your camera roll or do you have 30,000 photos that are impossible to see all of? Ali says that photos on your phone are just like having photos in your attic — they stay buried in there and you can’t look through them all.
To make it less daunting, sort your photos into folders by month. You can then go through each folder at a time, instead of having to sort through all 30,000 of them.
With digital photos, start with the photos that you know can be deleted: screenshots you don’t need anymore or if you’re like me, all of the photos of your car whenever you park! My favorite tip is to use the iPhone feature where you can search your camera roll for all photos you took on a certain day from all the past years.
Set a reminder once a day to sit down and go through all of the photos you took on that day every year, and the project won’t seem so overwhelming!
Printing books
Ali recommends printing books with the photos on your phone so you can actually go through them! When you have thousands on your phone, you are unable to look at them all and it is even harder to find the photos you want.
There are plenty of companies out there that will make books for you, or you can use a company like Shutterfly and upload and arrange them on your own. You can purchase multiple copies of these books so that everyone in your family can have one!
Enjoy your memories
Photos are one of, if not the most, emotionally charged things to declutter. Every photo has a story, and having to narrow them down can be draining.
This will be hard work, but it will also be immensely rewarding. When you hit a wall, think about how you will finally be able to have these memories accessible whenever you want them instead of locked away in a box.
Think about how grateful your family will be to have these photos, and how grateful your kids will be to not have to sort through them on their own! Take lots of breaks and lots of breaths. These photos are meant to be looked at, not shoved away.
Tracy McCubbin is the founder of dClutterfly, one of America’s top decluttering companies. Tracy looks at the root of our clutter to find the real cause and ways to find real solutions.