How I organised, scanned & shared my family photo archive. Part Two - Organizing my archive.

If you’ve ever opened a box of old family photographs and felt overwhelmed, you’re not alone. Decades of memories—some in albums, others scattered loosely in envelopes or boxes—can feel like an insurmountable challenge to organize. But preserving your family’s history for future generations is a rewarding project. This guide is the second in a series to help you systematically digitize your family photo archive. In this post, we’ll focus on getting your collection ready for scanning, ensuring a smooth and efficient process.

You can read my introduction and "Getting Started" blog post in the series here.

Digitizing Your Family Archive: Lessons from My Experience

I remember the moment I decided to tackle my family’s photo archive. Decades of memories—some neatly tucked into albums, others loosely scattered in boxes—felt like an overwhelming task. But I knew that if I didn’t take the time to organize and digitize them, these irreplaceable moments could be lost forever. If you’re in the same boat, let me share what I learned from my own experience to make this process as smooth as possible.

Step 1: Gather Everything in One Place

The first thing I did was bring all the photographs together. That meant digging through drawers, pulling out old albums, and emptying out bags and boxes filled with prints. Having everything in one place helped me get a sense of just how big the task was—and trust me, it was bigger than I expected!

Like me, you may be tempted to simply start scanning and get on with the job. However, I came to the conclusion that digitizing a physical mess into a digital one wasn't really progress, however good it felt to start work. Notwithstanding this, one of my objectives was to get some order to my photographs. After all, my family would inherit them in the future, and who knows what changes in technology, file formats, and restoration techniques might become available in the future?

Batching the work into discrete phases also felt logical to me. If I'm going to decorate a room, I do all the preparation first. Who would prepare a bit and paint a bit, repair a bit, paint a bit, and so on?

Step 2: Be Careful with Old Albums

Many of my family’s older albums had adhesive “magnetic” pages, which I quickly learned can damage photos over time. I used a thin, plastic spatula (and sometimes dental floss) to gently remove the pictures.

Step 3: Set aside the bad and the difficult

As I looked through the archive (I estimated I hade around 4000 photos) I realised that a small percentage fell into the "place aside and look at later"! Some examples were :-

1. Photos of no particular subject or of no known subject. This included photos of people I didnt recognise as family members or potential family members, miscelanious items, flowers, animals, and general misalinity.

2. Photos which were badly out of focus

3. Photos which were badly damaged, stuck into albums/card and coudnt be removed.

4. Negatives and slides - If negatives were in a photo wallett with the photos I labelled them with the year and location. I do have a negative and slide scanner so something for the future.

5. Other documents I came across isuch as newspaper cuttings, letters, wedding inviattions cards, and other family history items.

Step 3: Sort by Decade First, Then by Year

Sorting photos was time-consuming, but breaking it down into manageable steps made a huge difference. I started by separating them into years but this proved to be both time consuming and inaccurate. Eventually I settled on broad decades which made the task much more manageable.

Step 5: Protect and Label Your Photos

My initialstorage solution proved impractical for my large family archive

The subsequent storage was also simlified once I had settled on batching photos by decade. I had originally tried to store the photos by year in dedicated photo archive boxes which proved totally impractical. With only five decades to manage I was able to use shoeboxes devided by deacde which was a lot more flexible.

The Shoe Box Solution

Initially I tried to label each photo with comrehensive information - who,what,when and where. This again proved impractical and i decided to do a sort of each year immediately prior to scanning and then add metadata to the digital files later. Once in my PC this could be done quickly and copied to multiple files (more on this in the next blog).

Family Photo Archive - What’s Next?

Once I had everything organized, I was ready to start scanning—and that’s what I’ll cover in the next article. I’ll share tips on choosing the right scanner, setting up a good workflow, and managing your digital collection efficiently. Stay tuned!

Taking on a project like this can feel daunting, but trust me—it’s worth it. Have you started organizing your family photos? If so, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!