Photo Archiving

by Sonya Weisshappel

This article originally appeared in Sutton Place Social

A creaky leather-bound album, a shoebox full of beautifully handwritten letters, a portrait of your great-great-grandmother on her wedding day. These objects are part of your family’s story, and they’re what you’d reach for if you were fleeing a burning building. But these collections of memorabilia can often feel impossibly cluttered, harboring stagnant energy and emotional conflict. 

Gathering, sorting, and ultimately displaying photographs is a wintertime project that often remains uncompleted. Baby boomers must tackle so many different photo formats—technology has changed dramatically since the 1970s and ‘80s, and continues to evolve—that most abandon all hope. Generation Xers who grew up analog but learned to use digital become custodians of their parents’ or even grandparents’ one-of-a-kind collections. Wading through the quagmire of generational archives raises too many questions, conjures too many memories, and of course, provokes too many arguments about what to keep and what to throw away. 

Your initial spark of inspiration may be to find a particular photograph within a general category—birthdays, graduations, vacations—and share that important memory with a loved one. You have an image in your mind’s eye, but retrieving it turns into a game of logic. Was it before so-and-so was born or after? Between junior and senior year, or after college? OK, you’ve narrowed it down to the early 2000s, so it could have been taken with a digital camera. Did it ever get printed? 

Once you start combing through piles, you’ll soon realize that the project is about archiving your memorabilia rather than simply framing it. You must be willing to create a plan to organize, purge, catalog, and ultimately bring all of your photographs into one format and, as much as possible, in chronological order so that you can share them properly. 

Some people keep unframed hard copies along with undeveloped negatives in shoeboxes and bins, hopefully labeled by year or decade. It’s very satisfying to get those boxes off of the floor or out of closets. You’d be surprised how many rolls of film or negative strips you can throw away. But don’t toss anything out until you are 100% sure that you’ve scanned, uploaded, and saved it—and that you have the data backed up.

Photos are like the mail: They aren't going to stop, and we’re taking more than ever before! It’s enough to drive an organizer mad. What’s the proper form of tagging? By keyword, location, date, or facial recognition software? Shall we hand everything over to Google or Facebook? A portable external hard drive? What works for you probably won’t work for your kids and may never work for your parents. Pick your poison and commit to it. 

Take the time to do the hard work now and try to have some fun with it. And don’t be too hard on yourself. You may always keep bronze baby shoes or graduation tassels because they're part of your journey. If it speaks to you, and you can find a place for it, then it isn't clutter.