Taming the photo monster

I'm determined to get my photos under control. Not only do I have a ton of family photo prints from the last 40+ years (and of course most of them aren't labeled with dates, locations, or even people's names...bad Pat!) but I also have slides, and of course all the old family photos. While I've scanned a few of the photos, usually to share with other family members, I've not been particularly methodical about it (the My Pictures folder on my laptop is a nightmare...duplicates, triplicates, egads!). Sooo, it's time for a new strategy. And with that, I'm officially putting my current online photo collection in the timeout corner.

I've realized that having printed photos in an album just doesn't work for me. Once they go in there I never look at them. So the photos need to come out of the albums. And although I have racks and racks of slides, I haven't had a projector in years! Time to go digital.

I'll be separating the photos & slides into 2 piles:

• those I want to scan so I can view them online and easily make them available to the rest of the family
• those that aren't really all that interesting and/or are basically dupes of what's in that first pile (and why in the world do I take so many pictures of flowers anyway?)...these will likely go into photo archive boxes to collect dust (yeah, I know I should just toss 'em...but I won't)

Now I don't have a lot of patience for scanning so, to save my sanity, I'll be shipping that "to scan" pile off to a professional digital photo house to take care of that. Only exception to that is some of the really old family photos. I guess I have trust issues--I really don't want to let them out of my sight, plus I'm afraid they won't handle them gently--so those I will scan (or rescan) myself.

After I receive the digital files, figuring out the naming convention, where they should live on my system, and how/where to post these online will be the next challenge. And those other photos in my "timeout corner?" At some point I guess I'll have to go through those and see what's worth keeping and posting...but I'm a realist: that won't happen until later this year.

In the next month or so I'll post a link to the location of the new family photo library. Stay tuned.