Organize then Digitize your Printed Photos

**This is NOT a sponsored post but does contain affiliate links (marked by each product) that earn me a small commission if you purchase through the link.There is no additional cost to you but it does give my small business a tiny boost!

Do you want to have your physical photos digitized? Do yourself a favor and do some organizing first. If you just take your boxes of photos and start scanning, you are making a digital mess out of a physical mess. And the digital mess is actually harder to clean out than the physical mess! Why? Because with physical photos you can take a big table and make visual piles. This is much harder to do on a screen.

Case in point - I have several clients that come to me to sort out the digital mess they received back from big box scanning companies. They are so excited to send in their boxes of photos, slides or negatives thinking they will be able to easily enjoy their digital photo library upon their return. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. This same thing will happen if you are doing your own scanning without a plan. Here at Arrange Wander Focus we would never return files looking like this - all of our scans have dates and names that actually mean something. But we need to get that information from somewhere, and that is where organizing before digitizing comes in.

screenshot from finder showing list of files with random names and all the same date and time. — Files as received back from a big box scanning company. Helpful, right?

What type of organizing for physical photos should you do?

There are several different ways to organize your photos for scanning. My favorite is primarily chronological, with some subject matter groupings as well. There are several reasons for chronologically organizing your photos for scanning:

chronological is not subjective - a photo can only have one date when it was taken, even if you are guessing when that date is - so it can only go on one pile. Contrast this to trying to organize by person, which pile do you put the photo of your 3 kids in?
chronological requires fewer decision points. All you need to do is figure out roughly when the photo was taken and that is it
chronological also allows for grouping by event - put all of the wedding photos together in the chronological year

You don’t need to be exact. My rule of thumb is when you know the actual date, use that. If you know the year but not the day or month, use the year. If you only know the decade, use the decade. That’s really all you need.

Once the files are digital you can create as many different groupings as you like.

Supplies

You don’t need a whole lot to get you started. All you need are:

Space - a big table where you can leave your project sitting out for the duration
Index cards - to create your piles, mark these with the date and/or event and as you go through your photos simply pile them on top of these cards
Shoeboxes or other containers to hold your photos
Archival safe pencil to mark on the backs of photos as needed

I list some supplies that I like and use on my Favorite Products page.

Sorting

Clear off your big table and bring everything together.

As you review your photos, decide what to keep and what to toss using this method I discussed in a prior blog post.

Start with the easier photos first, such as envelopes with dates on them, piles of wedding photos where you know the date and event, that type of thing.

Write the date on an index card and sort your photos onto that pile. If the photos are in envelopes with negatives, keep the negatives with the photos. I find it easiest to create piles on the table in the beginning, then move them into shoeboxes with the index cards as I start to run out of room.

Is there writing on the back of the photo you might want to keep or add to a caption? Mark that photo with a sticky flag or note - but only stick to the back of the photo and test it first to ensure that it can be removed easily.

Work your way through your photos doing the best you can to sort them into dated piles. I often leave the harder ones in a separate pile for the end as often by that time I will have a better idea of where they go.

yellow cards with handwritten dates with piles of photos behind them

If you have slides and negatives, be sure to sort those too. Leave the negatives with the photos for now. Sort the slides the same way you sort your photos.

If you have photo albums, these can be scanned in album by a professional, or you can remove the photos. See this blog post for tips.

You don’t need to be perfect

Don’t stress if you can’t figure out a date. Put those photos in a more general pile such as “1930s” or “1930s-1940s”. Just do the best you can. It’s even ok to put them in a “miscellaneous to be dated later pile”. Just don’t let that pile get to be too big!

Dig Your Photos™ - A DIY photo organizing kit

Collage showing the DIG YOUR PHOTOS DIY kit with tools, instruction cards, and people organizing printed photos by year.

A fellow Certified Photo Manager has designed a product to make this process even easier. DIG YOUR PHOTOS!™ is a DIY print photo organizing kit that walks you step-by-step through the process of sorting your printed memories before you digitize them. It includes instructions, a timeline worksheet (helpful for dating even your own photos), sorting cards and organizing tools, and a temporary storage box to hold it all until you can digitize your collection. It also includes video guidance to help you each step of the way.

Learn more from the DIG YOUR PHOTOS!™ website (affiliate link) and from our Inside Photo Organizing podcast Season 3 episode 24 (at about the 8 min mark) and Season 2 Episode 15, or our YouTube Channel, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Time to scan

Once you have your photos organized, you can either scan them yourself or find yourself a trusted partner, such as yours truly. We can both organize your photos for you and do the scanning. Some of our clients prefer to organize first themselves and do a little cleanout along the way, others ask us to both organize the photos and scan them for you. We add the dates right into the metadata of the photo so that they will sort correctly in your photo library, and so that 10 years from now you’ll know when that photo was taken. We can also add additional information such as the who, what, and where. Whatever way you go, you’ll be glad you took some time to get these precious memories out of their boxes and and into a digital form where they can be enjoyed and shared.