Transform your ‘photo mess’ into a Legacy-Standard Collection
Your family photos and memorabilia may not hold great monetary value, but their sentimental value and capacity to connect your loved ones to the past and to a part of themselves is simply priceless.
A large, disorganised collection of photographs, however, will act more as a burden than a gift. The reality is: your loved ones don’t want to inherit a photo mess! It will create frustration and confusion for them, and they may even decide not to keep its contents.
Many of us have the intention to clean up and organise our photos and memorabilia, but the sheer scale of the task quickly deters us as we are filled with overwhelm and uncertainty over where to start.
Today we’ll delve straight into the simple and actionable steps you can take to ensure your family photo collection is of a Legacy Standard to be cherished by your loved ones for the generations to come.
The process requires dedication and patience, but carving out the time to do it, really is the ultimate gift for yourselves and for those who will inherit the collection.
I suggest you start out by getting crystal clear about your why and visualising the outcome of what you want to accomplish. Keeping this vision at the forefront of your mind will help you get through to the finish line!
1. Sort, Organise and Discard
Sort
We need to start somewhere, and the best place is by gathering all your photographic material into the one space, assessing the mess and creating an inventory. This will help you plan the scope of your project and the time it will take.
Have a designated spot in your home where you can undertake the work and your supply kit ready.
I’ve created a free guide to aid this process, which you can access by scrolling to the bottom of this page!
Organise
Organise your photos in a way that makes sense to you. Think about your future self, and how you would most easily be able to retrieve them. My preferred method is organising chronologically, but many people like to organise their photos based on seasons or themes in their live: ‘children’s early years, primary school, high school, family holidays, travel-pre-children, weddings, babies’ etc. Choose a system that works for you and your collection.
Discard
You have permission to discard photos! In fact, I highly encourage it. A curated collection of meaningful photographs will be of far greater value to you, and I promise; truly liberating.
I suggest you discard any duplicates, many of the scenery, sunsets, travel shots, and photos that don’t hold any significant meaning. Aim to eliminate 80%. This may seem extreme, but it will help you with creating a legacy standard collection. If it tells a story for you, keep it, if not throw it out!
2. Enrich your photos with meaning: capture the stories and descriptions.
‘A picture tells a thousand words’… but if you have thousands of pictures without descriptions, your family members may never know their significance and what the photographs represented for you.
This could create frustration (‘I know this photo was important to my grandfather, but I have no idea why!’) and uncertainty about whether they should hold onto or not. Give your loved ones the gift of your story. It will mean the world to them. Having a sorted and organised collection with your memories and stories intact will give your photos context. It will make your collection invaluable to them, by helping them connect to you.
TOP TIPS:
• TELL it: Use the voice recording app on your phone to record yourself telling the story behind the photo. This oral method is far more effective than writing it down, initially, as it will come to you more fluidly. You can focus on retelling the memory rather than trying to construct a seamless sentence. You can later transcribe your recording onto paper or into a spreadsheet and perfect your paragraphs!
• ASK yourself: What is your personal relationship to the photo? Who is featured in the photograph and what else does it evoke for you about that time?
• You can also use the voice recording app to record the stories behind family heirlooms and memorabilia. This can also be transcribed afterwards and printed out on paper to accompany the pieces. They will become so much more meaningful when passed down with their story, rather than just being a vase or a piece of furniture.
3. Preservation and storage of physical material
Photographic material is vulnerable to many risks from its own physical make up and surrounding environment. It requires very specific storage, environmental conditions, and good handling practices to ensure its longevity over time. I worked with photographic collections for over ten years at the State Library of Victoria and then at the British Library in London, so I know a thing or two about photographic preservation practices!
Attics and basements are simply NOT suitable storage spaces for photographic material! Yet, this is where we see many people’s collections ending up (waiting to be dealt with one day…!). While the average home isn’t likely to have access to temperature control measures used by libraries and archives, there are still many things you can do to support the longevity of your photographs.
It’s also common for people to store their photographs within plastic bags in plastic tubs or cardboard boxes (that are often falling apart). It’s important to remove the photographs from these containers and rehouse them into preservation friendly storage material that have passed the Photographic Activity Test (PAT).
TOP TIPS:
Get your photos out of the attic/basement and plastic sleeves, and into archival storage containers located in rooms with average temperatures, low lighting, and low humidity.
Photographic negatives and prints should never be stored together as they each have specific requirement - but I do recommend keeping them together if that’s how you found them, until you have established a cross-referencing system that works for you.
4. Digitise well
Digitising your printed photos is an excellent preservation method and also facilitates sharing options, like photo books or an online family archive.
Unfortunately, we see too many people who have invested time in digitising their precious photos using low quality batch scanners or even worse, the scanning app on their phones and then sometimes even discarding the originals!! Don’t let this be you! Low quality scans are fine for a reference, but if you want long-lasting, high-quality renditions of your photographs for your legacy collection, the digitising process must follow certain standards.
TOP TIPS:
Digitising is timely and involves not only the purchase of good quality equipment and software, but an organised workflow, high attention to detail and lots of patience!
If available, scan the negative over the print. Negatives are the original camera capture and will always produce a better-quality image with greater colour accuracy. Is this important? Personally, I think in the context of creating your photo legacy – yes, it is!
This may be an area you wish to outsource. We provide this service to our clients and are happy to chat to you about what your best options for the specifics of your collection.
BACK UP: The 3-2-1 back up rule is the golden industry standard. This implies you have three copies of your data on two types of storage media with one back-up copy stored offsite. This could look like: your photo hub saved on two separate external hard drives and one back-up copy saved in the cloud. Using this method will significantly reduce the risk of data loss.
5. Utilise Metadata to capture the descriptive information about the photographs.
Metadata – data about data, it is the information about the file that gives it context and meaning. With your printed photographs, you may find handwritten notes on the reverse, like in the picture above, and essentially, that is metadata: information about the record.
Although it’s a time-consuming process, adding metadata is a powerful way to make your photographs searchable and accessible over time.
In Apple’s built in Photos programme, it is simple to add keywords, mark favourites and facial recognition with the AI technology. But unfortunately, this information is not embedded in the image, it is saved as an external file. When people export their images from Apple’s Photos, this information gets lost! We want your photos to be findable over time, regardless of the software being used to view them.
Like most aspects of Photo Organising, adding keywords and tags to photographs is very tedious and timely process! If you embark on this process, you want to ensure the metadata is part of the file – not saved separately – so it remains intact with the photo. You can do this through Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop.
We provide this service to our clients and ensure that the descriptive information is captured and saved in a way that it remains available for future generations.
6. File names matter
If you want a collection that lasts beyond a lifetime, how you name your photos matters.
Automated file names like ‘IMG_5075.jpg’ and ‘DSC_1049-copy.jpg’ are completely meaningless and honestly such a nuisance!
I recommend using the year and date of capture and the subject.
For example: 2011-12-25-Christmas-001.jpg. If you are unsure about the month and day, you could name it 2011-1-1-roadtrip.jpg and then add ‘circa’ into the metadata to communicate the uncertainty around the exact time of year.
If you think you have no idea of when the photograph was taken, look closer. There are usually clues within the photograph to help us identify the date: fashion, hairstyles, counting the candles on birthday cakes, as well as clues in the surrounding environment of the image. Recently I was able to date a photograph of my sister taken in London as the summer in 1999, as there was a billboard in the background advertising the film ‘Notting Hill’ which was released in cinemas in June that year.
TOP TIPS:
Choose a file naming system that works for you and stick to it!
7. Create and Share
By the time you’ve reached this stage you will already be experiencing the RESULTS you’ve created by investing the time and energy in organising your collection. Congratulations!
It feels empowering and relieving to know where all your photos are and to have a beautifully organised system that is backed up to industry standards and that can be accessed for generations to come.
Having your collection organised and curated will enable you to easily create and design the shareable outcomes for your photographs. This is the fun part!
It could be in the form of:
• A series of archival photo books
• An online family gallery
• Archival framed prints or a gallery wall
TOP TIPS:
• It is worthwhile considering your plan for passing along your legacy collection, both digital and printed. Do your digital assets need adding to your estate plan? This may be necessary to ensure loved ones are legally able to access them.
We love helping our clients create and design these outcomes and are happy to chat with you about the best options for your unique collection!
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