Living in a wooded area of California, our client Allison and her family have experienced the very real worry of wildfire threats. Fortunately, their family home has been safe from the devastation that many Californians have experienced. But Allison is worried about the potential of future wildfires threatening their home, their lives and of course, her family’s memories. She wanted to know more about photo organizing so she could have peace of mind about her family memories.
Allison searched on the internet to find a solution for her disorganized photos which were spread around her home. She found Pixologie’s YouTube Channel on the internet and contacted us for help. She eagerly signed up for our course on organizing photos which includes weekly support calls. A busy physician with a family, Allison started and stopped on her photo organization work over six months. At one point, everything had to be packed away because her daughter returned home from college.
Somewhat cheerfully defeated (yes, that is a thing!), Allison called me and said, “I just don’t think I can do it.” We spoke and emailed about options including shipping the photos to our offices in Wisconsin.
Having gotten to know Allison through support calls, something led me to fly out to her home and actually help her physically organize her photos. I planned a five day trip and brought a high speed scanner, optimistically (LOL) thinking we could tackle and complete her project in that time frame.
In this picture you can see how Allison gathered everything to one location in her daughter’s bedroom. With this many boxes, a photo collection can easily have 15,000 to 20,000+ photos.
Day 01 Information, Inventory and First Sort – Skimming the Top Photo Organizing
Upon arriving at Allison’s home, I gathered some quick information and dates to set up a family tree so I could know who’s who and create an age chart. Then in about three hours, the two of us efficiently took her collection of bins, boxes, bags, etc and divided it up by major category (Mom’s Photos, Her Husband’s Photos, Decades, Portraits and Career Photos). We also found slides and tapes to set aside. The Inventory and First Sort is always the easy part!
We set up two folding tables to have enough space to spread everything out.
Day 02 & Day 03 – Second Sort – Breaking Decades into Years – Deep Photo Organizing
On Day 02, our first full day, we were able to divide up Allison’s Mom’s Photos, Portraits, the 70s, 80s and 2000s by year. This included removing photos from albums (after photographing some of them to capture the handwriting and notes).
Allison was amazed at the process and couldn’t ever imagine how she could do this on her own. We worked for ten hours to get the collection to the point you can see in the photo below.
There was still so much to do. I began to realize we probably weren’t going to have much time, if at all, for photo scanning.
On Day 03, we divided up the 1990s by year and also began working on sorting the portraits by family member. I worked on Allison’s mom’s photos by year and the family heritage group. We also got the 2000s organized by month which was a big task as some months had hundreds of photos – you know the months when a baby was born! Allison and her husband have three children so there were thousands of photos in hundreds of photo envelopes. And, her film developing orders were always for triplicates, not just duplicates!
We created a duplicates box and I’m estimating there were at least 4,000 duplicates.
I realized at some point that there was only one photo of Allison’s honeymoon with her husband. She said they had gone to Hawaii and there were great photos. She wondered where those photos might be. (Insert ominous music foreshadowing a surprise coming the next day!)
Together, we spent 35 hours over these two days working on the project. Whew! Allison was such a trooper and she thought I had great stamina.
In the meantime, Allison’s sister was hoping to use their mother’s photos for a project. She was anxious to be able to use the old prints as soon as possible. I took those pictures back to my hotel room for scanning them that evening. Then I uploaded them to Allison’s Forever® account. This way, Allison’s sister could use the photos right away.
Day 04 – Packing Photos Up to Be Shipped
I had reserved Day 04 for photo scanning, but clearly there was so much work to be done yet. My plane was to leave early on Day 05. We instead prepared to finish the organizing work and to pack the photos to be shipped to our offices for further organization and scanning.
But first, Allison loved being able to send her sister a link to view their mother’s childhood photos. This saved a six hour drive and, these special photos are now preserved for generations to come, while being easily downloaded and used for photobook and scrapbook projects.
Over the next eight hours, we worked on removing more duplicates from the 1990s, organizing the portraits further. And, slowly, methodically packing photos into shipping boxes marked with their contents.
In the afternoon, Allison called me to come to their attic. She had found three more bins of photos and scrapbooks! At this point, nearly 50 hours into the project, we weren’t sure to laugh or cry – but good news – their honeymoon photos were in those bins!
All these new photos needed to be sorted and consolidated into the work we had already done. But, that was going to have to take place back at our offices. For the rest of the afternoon, we packed those items up and prepared to go to the Fedex office.
Wrapping Up Our Photo Organizing Weekend
At the Fedex office, Allison expressed concern about shipping eight priceless boxes of her family photos to our offices in Wisconsin. The FedEx manager reassured us that in her eight years at the shipping store, she had never processed a claim for a lost box.
Still, we both watched the progress of the shipment through Fedex’s package tracking app on our phones. The shipment arrived in three and a half days right on schedule.
As I left California, Allison texted me, saying “Last night, I looked at my photos from the 1970s on my Forever account. I am going to next share these with my mother. I am so happy and grateful. Thank you so much for an amazing weekend!”
Allison is looking forward to seeing the completion of her project and thrilled to have her photos in Pixologie’s hands so our team can get to work for her.
Organizing photos is hard work and we’d love to be a resource as you contemplate tackling your photo collection.