Updated Sep. 23, 2019. Originally posted Aug. 27, 2019.
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Film or Digital?
The organization of photos & negatives is a tricky topic to handle because it really depends not only on your preferred methods, but also on whether you use film or digital when shooting. I’m going to try to keep this as simple as possible, but that might mean I miss some details, so if you have a particular question, please ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer it. (Skip whatever steps aren’t relevant to you and the photo formats you have/use.)
STEP 1: Determine what you have to organize in this category: printed photos, negatives, digital images, undeveloped film.
(I don’t think anyone is really taking new slides anymore, are they?) This is the essential first step so you know where you’re headed. Within these items that we have to organize, there are three “sub-categories” of items:
- those that are archived for future reference (like negatives, or digital images that you’ve already printed),
- those that you’re “currently” working with in some manner (like images that are printed but waiting to go into scrapbooks or albums), and
- those that are waiting to become “current” (like film waiting to be developed or digital images waiting to be printed).
So let’s make sure we tackle all three sections of the process.
Getting the Images – Film
If you’re still dealing with film in some manner, you’ll need to address the steps in at least part of this section. The first part of the film-image process is getting your film developed. I don’t know about you, but my film always seemed to sit around for ages waiting because I didn’t budget properly for film development, so then I’d have to do a whole pile of them all at once.
STEP 2: Figure out how many rolls of film you shoot, on average, and adjust your budget to allow for the development of this film.
STEP 3: Gather up any existing rolls of film and make a plan for getting them developed. (If there is only a roll or two, you might just plan to take it the next time you run errands. If you have fifty rolls lying around, you might have to come up with a more sophisticated plan.)
Getting the Images – Digital
Most of us are into the digital age now, even if we still have one foot in the film camp. Digital cameras make it easy to take lots of photos. However, many of us haven’t yet come up with systems for dealing with these photos. This means most of us have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of images just sort of dumped onto our computers and languishing on the hard drives.
So I’m going to say that digital images take more preparation than film images to get to the printed stage. That’s because they don’t inherently come neatly divided into 12’s or 24’s or 36’s. You have to come up with some structure yourself. Personally, I like to sort my images into date-based folders. So each year has a folder (“2013”), and within that, images are in folders named by year-month-date, like this: “2013-08-27” The reason for doing the dates this way is that it means that the folders/images automatically sort in order.
Now, my newest camera already dates images similarly, and will put them into date-based folders. If yours doesn’t, check your settings and see if you can change the filename structure. My old camera didn’t put dates in the image names – just sequential numbers – and it makes it much harder to tell when I took any given image.
STEP 4: Set up a folder structure for photos on your hard drive.
STEP 5: Move existing photos as necessary so they are organized within the structure you just set up.
(Believe me, it will make the following steps much easier if your photos are in order first!)
Now, you have some options here, depending on your “style.” At this point, you will probably want to delete all of your unnecessary photos. Some people are more comfortable purging than others. Some people will recommend keeping only the few prime images, and discarding anything that’s not the very, very best shot. I can’t do that.
There are images that, while their quality isn’t what I want to look at again and again in my albums, make me smile or bring back memories when I flip through the files. I like that digital lets me do both – I keep these files, but I don’t print them. But certainly you can delete the duds – totally blurry images, pictures you accidentally took of the light fixture or your foot. You get the idea. This will save room on your hard drive and, later, on your backup disks.
Also, some people like to edit their images heavily before printing. I don’t, because then I’d never get them printed. It is a good idea, though, to go through and check for red-eye and fix that. While you’re at it, you can do any moderate editing that might be required by certain pictures to “save” them. (If, for instance, you have a great shot that’s way too dark, you can lighten it up fairly easily.) I like to use PhotoScape. It’s free and it’s very intuitive to use, especially for basic edits.
Most importantly, we need to know what we have. Some people will recommend doing this “inventory” I’m about to mention closer to the end of the process (like right after printing). For me, I found that was holding me up. I could do this first in just a few minutes, and be better able to keep track of just where I was in the process. You’ll want to list your pictures. Not every single image, but a list of months or dates and what there are pictures of. (I’ll write another post later this week breaking down in more detail how I do this.)
Sooo, what are our steps here?
STEP 6: Go through each photo folder and do three things: list the photos/events that are in it (along with the dates), delete any obviously bad shots (feel free to delete more heavily if you’re comfortable), and fix obvious issues like red eye.
STEP 7: If you want to do additional editing, this is the time to do it.
Printing!
Now your images are ready to be printed. If you have a backlog, keep your eyes open for coupon codes from Shutterfly. (Also keep in mind a tidbit my sister pointed out to me: their coupons are often for 101 free prints, but the shipping goes up notably from 99 prints to 100, so it’s cheaper to just get 99.)
STEP 8: Figure up how many pictures you take (that need to be printed) on average, and adjust your budget if necessary to allow for printing them.
STEP 9: Get your pictures printed!
(I have been loving Shutterfly’s new uploader. It is so easy to use!)
The reason we made that list is two-fold. It will help you remember dates later, but at this point, you can check off which ones you’ve had printed so you know which ones you still need to do. 🙂
STEP 10: BACK UP.
Let me say that again. Back up. You do not want to lose months’ or years’ worth of photographs! Once you’ve printed your photos, you can copy them onto disks. I like DVD-ROM’s for this. If there’s any way possible, use redundant backups. (That means back up in more than one place.) So you could copy them all to DVD, move them all from your main hard drive to an external hard drive used for this specific purpose, and/or use an offsite backup service like Carbonite (which is also easy to use, by the way).
Organizing the Actual Pictures
So you have your photos in hand. Now what? It will depend a lot on how you present your photos and how time-consuming that process is. If you scrapbook, it will take longer than if you just pop your pictures into albums, so you’re more likely to get backlogged. I’ve found, though, that a relatively quick sort can make it easier to have the option of coming back and scrapbooking a little without having to go through a whole huge process in the moment.
STEP 11: Just like you did on your hard drive, sort your images by year and by month.
If you have a lot of pictures from a given month, you might want to then break it down by event.
How you do this is up to you. If you scrapbook and you use page protectors, you can actually slide each “batch” of photos into one of the page protectors so they’re already with your albums. Or you can use photo storage boxes or something along those lines. The idea is to have them broken down sufficiently that you can go in and grab one single stack and get it into scrapbooks or albums without having to dig through everything else.
This is also where our list serves its second function. If you did it “right,” you should have notes of the dates that go with these pictures so you don’t have to dig back through all of your files.
Archiving
Finally, you need to organize your “archives.” You will have either negatives or digital files or possibly both. If you’re dealing with digital files, and you’ve followed the previous steps, they should already be organized and backed up. The only question at this point is where/how you want to store them. If you’ve created disks, you need a place for them!
If you have negatives, they may require sorting. I would break them down the same way we did our digital files – by year, then month, then day/event. Be sure to store them in an archival-safe manner so they don’t degrade unduly. If you can afford it, you might want to have them digitized. Otherwise, you can just store them. I think these are a great option.
STEP 12: Decide on a method and sort (if necessary) and store your negatives/files.
[Here’s another post I found very helpful, regarding backing up pictures.]
Do you have anything to add? A better way of doing something? A favorite product or service? Please share!
If you’re just stumbling across this, please click here for the other posts in the series.
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