093 - Organize all photos, digital and prints

In the good old days, we picked up our photos from a remote developer or a photo shop. They were stacked in an envelope with the dark negatives stored in a shorter pocket inside. We were limited by the size of the film role, usually 24 or 36, though we could sometimes squeeze an extra shot or two out of it.

Most of us--the normal ones, anyway--ripped open the envelope and rifled through the pictures. "Look at this one," was a pretty common phrase along with the variation: "Check this out." Then we put the envelopes full of photos in a shoebox with a promise to ourselves that we would have to load these things into a photo album.

Ahem...

Maybe I just dislike buying photo albums.

Then there is the situation such as the one at my parent's house. They have tons of old photos, most of them haphazardly stored in boxes, mixed like so much soil and gravel. A vein of their early years of marriage can be found, like a layer of sediment, only to abruptly end and a mix of color photos from Christmas in 1971 and my sister's junior high days in the 1980s dominates. You can sense there was once a rhyme and reason for the contents but it has long since been lost to browsers who were not privy to the system.

Not to fear, technology has created a wonderful cure: digital photos. Now we're only limited by the size of our storage cards or the memory on our cameras. We can review photos instantly, discard those we don't like, only keep the good ones, experiment with poses and angles and lighting and effects. Life is good.

Except now we have more photos than ever. And they're all over our virtual worlds. In fact, they might be more disorganized than the printed photos. If we don't have them stored somewhere besides our primary disk drive, we run the risk of losing them all...permanently.

Photos have never been more disorganized, unsafe, and plentiful as they are now. While technology is an enabler of this situation, it is also the savior. We can digitize everything. We can infinitely copy (assuming available storage) each photo.

Thus, task #093 on the 101 Things in 1,001 Days: organize all photos. Jocelyn and I will undoubtedly share this task. I'd like to organize all of our digital photos, digitize all of our old print photos, and archive (either online or to DVD or both) all of them.

This is a big task. Have you done this? Or are you one of those people that keeps everything nice and tidy?

I need tips, pointers, and lessons learned.