I'm overwhelmed with old photo prints, 3 or 4 generations worth. Any suggestions on sorting, and storing? I'm not a scrapbooker, but eventually, would like to do one for each of my children. I'm also into genealogy, so would like to keep that in mind for the old family photos. Thanks, y'all.
By ~gloria
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I do so agree with Chloelizabeth. Label everything you can. If you've any family left, ask them. If you're lucky enough to still live in the place you were brought up, ask the villagers, some-one may know something. Even if it is only 'I think that's so-and-so' write it down, qualified as a possibility. I have a WWI photo of a man in khaki and four great-uncles it could be, or perhaps it's none of them. It would be so fascinating to know. When they've gone from memory, they're gone forever.
Marg from England.
I'm still working on organizing my photos, but the first thing I did was label all of them with at least the year and who was in the picture. Next I sorted them by year. My friend gave me a nifty photo organizer, and it was perfect. It was just a box with dividers built into it, but it was just what I needed.
I have a digital camera now, and every time I take the photos off the camera, I rename the file with the year first, then month, then day and then who is in the picture and/or the place the photo was taken. NO photo is allowed on my computer if it hasn't been properly labeled.
Someday maybe I will have my scrapbooks done, but for now, it is good enough to know my photos are all labeled and sorted. Yes, I do have a backup of my photos. I'd hate to lose them.
If you have a computer, these can be scanned and printed to make identical scrapbooks. As the last member of my family, I would past on to you this: LABEL with as much information as possible any old photographs.
I also strongly endorse the scanning and labelling ideas.
I lost everything in Hurricane Ivan except for a very few photos, I wish with all my heart I'd thought to scan all those hundreds of photos and other documents to a disc or flash drive. If I had it all to do again, I'd have several copies so I could leave one in the safe deposit, one with a trusted friend in another area, and of course at least one copy to each of the adult children.
My grandson will never know what his dad looked like as a baby because those photos went with the hurricane-I couldn't even gather things from friends and family because everyone lived in the disaster zone and they too lost everything.
The only reason I have a few things (like my son's junior year high school picture and birth certificates) is because I'd put those things into the safe deposit box.
The pictures taken since the hurricane have gone onto the computer, onto the online storage, and onto a flash drive. When I was visiting my son last year in south AL during the terrible tornadoes, every time the sirens went off we made sure the little flash drive was in his pocket, and the laptop in my rolling bag because we couldn't stand the thought of the photos being lost again!
It's funny that you are posting this question; I've been scanning and trying to get my photos organized for weeks now. I've purchased several photo albums that I had to return because none seems to work for me. I'm dealing with over 50 years of photos; all different sizes and a lot without dates.
I'm not into scrapbooking because of the time and expense. Just want to get them in some sort of order. As of yet I've failed to find a solution. Can't find refill pages for the few albums I have. I've searched this site as well as others and not found anything that works without spending a fortune. I'm about ready to throw them back in the photo boxes I had them in. This question has been posted so often I get the impression others are having as much trouble as myself.
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