Like most, I spent more time at home last year because of Covid-19 . I used this time to tackle a personal organising project that I had been keeping for a later stage in my life, when I would have more time in my hands: re-organising old photo albums dating back from the late 1980s to the early 2000s before the advance of the digital era into photography.
That’s how I tackled my old photo albums reorganisation
You may wonder why re-organising old photos that were already in photo albums. Well, my husband did ask. The thing is, back then, we had to print all photos on a roll, regardless of their quality. Like many, I kept most of the prints to avoid feeling wasteful. Most of them made it into photo albums, the worst ones were kept in a box.
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With the advance of the digital era in photography, this excuse no longer stood. I happily started to delete the digital photos that didn’t meet my standards, print the selected few I really liked, and put them into photo albums – something that gives me a lot of pleasure to create and the whole family a lot of pleasure to look at.
After a while, it became clear when I looked at my old photo albums that many of the photos didn’t really deserve a place in them. I saw an opportunity to reduce the number of photo albums and save space on our shelves and I had been wanting to streamline those old photo albums since then. But I knew it would be a large project to tackle.
So when Singapore went into lockdown in April 2019, I decided that it was the right time to tackle this project not only to keep me busy but also to keep me distracted from the bad news.
Step 1: Doing a quick & dirty purge
I first went through my 22 old photo albums and the photos box (more than 2,000 prints in total) and got rid of the no-brainers i.e. the ones that were unflattering, blurred, out of focus, etc. More than 25% of the photos went in a matter of two hours.
Step 2: Scanning the prints
I decided to scan all the prints that had survived the first cut to give me the courage to let go of more. I used PhotoScan, a free scanner app from Google Photos using the phone camera. You basically take the first photo of the print and the app directs you to take 4 more at each corner before saving it onto your phone. It sometimes took me a few takes to get a good result. But I must confess that I was not extremely thorough as saving a memory of the print was more important to me than the quality of the digital photo itself.
Step 3: Downloading the scanned photos into my digital photos repository
After scanning, I downloaded the scanned photos onto One Drive on my computer which is my main digital photos repository. They are then automatically saved onto the cloud.
Step 4: Organising the scanned photos
I opted for a simple categorisation, by year, and named the pictures using the following naming convention: YearMonth_Event (where applicable) e.g. 199109_CousinWedding. At that point, I also backed them up on an external drive.
Step 5: Purging prints further
With the reassurance that all the photos I liked had been saved and backed up, I proceeded to further purge the print photos and kept the best ones. I got rid of 25% more.
Step 6: Creating new photo albums
I treated myself and invested in new photo albums. I placed the photos into the photo albums adding comments here and there to tell a story.
I’m delighted with the end product, but to be honest, I’m also relieved it’s over. It was an extremely long and tedious process that took me about 50 hours to complete.
There were times I felt discouraged and considered putting the project on hold for a while. But deep down I knew it would be difficult to get back to it if I were to stop. What kept me going was the joy of sharing the digitised photos with family and friends. It gave us an opportunity to talk about the old good times. It also gave me the opportunity to escape the reality of Covid-19 and travel the world in the comfort of my home.
I know many people dream of having their photos nicely organised in photo albums. If that’s your case, I highly recommend you to ask yourself first why it is you want to do it and what it is you are hoping to achieve so you can be clear on what’s involved and manage your expectations accordingly. Looking back, one thing I would have done differently is to outsource the scanning (I did scan about 1,400 photos – what was I thinking?!) to professionals such as Tekkie Help to save time.
If you need help to develop a process to organise your photos, reach out! And if you need the accountability to carry your project to completion, check out my Group Accountability Program. It offers a supportive, non-judgmental, and empowering community to help you achieve your goals, whatever they might be, at your own pace.
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