Post date: Feb 24, 2018 3:01:01 AM

Have you been procrastinating dealing with your old family photos? Many of us have a set of old albums handed down from our parents, or maybe several boxes of loose photos, and a drawer full of old framed photos. It can seem overwhelming; however, if you want to preserve them to hand them down to your children, or share them with other relatives, where do you start?

Decide on your goal: do you want to scan photos and then transfer them to new albums? Do you want to scan them in and share them digitally? Either way, there are five steps to preserve your family photos. You will need: sticky notes, pens, scissors, a scanner and a small trash can.

First, gather those shoe boxes, old albums, and tubs of old framed photos and start sorting them. Find a large flat surface, like your dining room table, where you can make piles of loose pictures. Create categories: put them in piles by generation – grandparents, parents, your generation, and your children, or come up with a different system. Grab some sticky notes and identify your piles, in case you need to break and come back to your task.

Next, tackle those old framed photos. Remove the frames: you may want to keep a few, especially if they are especially fancy or have sentimental value, but you can donate the rest. Then, you will have a stack of photos that you can scan.

If you have the old-fashioned kind of photo albums with sticky pages and plastic sheets, tear them apart as carefully as you can. I did this with several dozen albums, and got better as I went along at peeling off the photos but sometimes had to use scissors. I ended up with half a dozen decorative shoe boxes of loose pictures and several garbage bags full of the discarded albums. Then you can sort and scan these photos as well. If you don’t think you can safely remove the photos from especially fragile old photo albums, scan them page by page on a flatbed scanner.

As you sort photos, you will probably come across people you do not recognize. Now what? Ask for help: call your older relatives and schedule a visit. You might be in for some great stories—or find out no one knows who they are, and then you don’t need to scan them in. However, check other albums to see if you spot those same people, and if there’s writing on the back of photos, your mystery is solved.

If you don’t have a scanner, a basic Epson Photo and Document scanner sells for $70. Otherwise, companies like www.scanmyphotos.com will send you a box that you fill with up to 1,800 photos for a flat rate of $145 to scan, crop, edit and archive your photos on a DVD.

Second, scan the photos in, either using a scanner connected to your computer or a mobile device with app. Some people use apps like PhotoScan on their phone or tablet; however, scanners will give you the best results. I created a dedicated scanning station by connecting an older laptop and my Epson flatbed scanner. Before you start, clean off the surface of the scanner with a microfiber cloth (do NOT spray glass cleaner on your scanner because it can damage the glass). Then check your scanner’s settings: use 600 DPI (dots per inch) for good results.

Most scanners are easy to use: place the photo, start the scan, and check the resulting image. Refer to the scanner company’s online manuals & tutorials if you have questions. Most scanning software lets you fix red eyes, straighten, and crop.

Work with photos in groups (pictures of my daughter’s childhood, for example) and save photos in a consistent format (not “birthday,” but “mikki fifth birthday”). You may find duplicate photos as well as some that are blurry, taken too far away, feature strange expressions on people’s faces, or are too similar to better pictures: give yourself permission to throw them away.

Third, create folders on your computer to store the scanned in images, with folder names that reflect your organizational scheme—you don’t want to hand family members a flash drive or DVD with 1,000 pictures on it. Ten folders with 100 each will seem less intimidating. As you scan a group of photos, stop periodically to drag files to the right folder. If you are determined to keep them on your computer, invest in an external hard drive to back them up. After all of this work, you don’t want to lose them.

Fourth, decide what to do with the actual photos. I filled a number of new photo albums, including some for my children. Next, I filled several big three-ring notebooks with protective plastic sheets and used them for those larger pictures that had once been framed. I added labels to the spine and front cover of all of my photo albums.

Some families might divide up the photos between several households and let people decide what to do with their pictures, while others might go ahead and fill albums with treasured photos and present them as gifts. If you store them, avoid places where the temperature and humidity fluctuate, so skip the basement, attic and garage. Instead, store photos in closets, cabinets, and other places in your home.

Fifth, using the folders that you saved your pictures to, upload them to a cloud service that you can then share with family members. Google photos is a great example; however, there are numerous options, like iCloud, Drop box, Shutterfly, and Flickr.

So, there you go: five steps to preserving your family photos. It’s a time-consuming process, but well worth it. I’m still working my way through the boxes of pictures, but I’ve filled up several of the labeled albums and feel a sense of accomplishment. So will you—but you need to get started!

Last updated February 23, 2018

This article appeared in the Waterloo Courier on February 23, 2018 in a condensed form.

http://wcfcourier.com/lifestyles/column-preserve-old-photos-with-new-technology/article_0527b270-1650-5ae1-9031-92120f0c211b.html

COLUMN: Preserve old photos with new technology