Digitize your Life: How to Scan, Organize, and Disseminate Your Family Photos, Videos, and Other Visual Data (Update)

Updated 2 years ago

Awkward

Introduction

Many of us older folks, and probably our parents and grandparents, have old photos, videos, film reels, letters, artwork, etc that have never been digitized, maybe stuffed in a box somewhere or old photo albums stuck in a closet or the attic. This presents a ticking time bomb. They are realistically in danger of getting lost forever.

Beyond the obvious benefit of saving the photos forever:
1. Older people get to relive their whole life
2. You will probably get pictures you’ve never seen 
3. When they pass on, no need to go through the emotional roller coaster of sorting through albums and “Which sibling gets it all.”  Or, more likely, one sibling gets the boxes and they go into someone’s attic and get forgotten. This is procrastination at its worst, and milgly generationally selfish.
4. Friends and relatives can get a link to the shared cloud drive folder
5. You learn so much about, and gain a greater appreciation of, your parents and it brings up a LOT of conversation.
6. You may not care, but future generations might. The point is to get the info while they are still alive. Better do it sooner rather than later, while you have access to the photos, and you are alive! And if digitizing old people’s photos, do it while they can identify the year the photo was taken, and the people in it! It’s a wonderful gesture to do this for the elderly.

I will outline the process for digitizing and organizing your collection and making it available to friends and family. It is for beginners and is simple enough for even the non-tech-saavy to understand. I have been through this process and I figured some efficiencies through trial and error.

Steeling yourself and grinding it out is a chore, but only has to be done once.

Organize the physical photos

Sit down in a comfortable place somewhere and sort the photos by date. Write the date down on the back of the photo. You could conceivably just write the year, that should suffice. Put them all in a box large enough to hold them. I used these, which are shoebox sized:

Michaels Black

Each box holds ~700 photos. Because they are a specific color, you immediately know what’s in them. They stack efficiently, and you can stack them without worry as high as possible if you get them against a corner. And if you use a Brother P-Touch label maker, be sure to get the cheap knockoffs for label tape on Amazon, which are, incredibly, a tenth of the price.
Keep a separate box for duplicates. You also may need an oversize box for oversize photos:

Oversized Black

Scan away

Now is the grind. Set up your printer to scan, and make sure everything is within ergonomic reach. You should scan at least 300DPI (dots per inch); 600 is even better if you can afford the time and disk space. Clean the screen every so often with alcohol or similar. Imperfections ont he screen will haunt you later. It’s very tedious. Maybe play an audiobook or play Youtube videos while you do this. Take hourly stretching breaks.

To reduce even more clutter, you can also take photos of old keepsakes, and throw away the keepsakes! I suggest throwing away letters and newspaper clippings after scanning as well, and just keeping the photos.

Once you are done, put the photos in the “Done” box and put in a safe place, such as an attic, closet or fireproof safe. Consider elevating them to eliminate water damage. As you will be scanning them at a decent resolution, you will probably never have to go through them again. You probably don’t even have to sort them alphabetically, or by year. You can probably throw away a lot, such as doubles, but you can also designate a box as Duplicates.

Name them

I suggest getting a rhythm and naming them as you scan. Stick to a naming convention. I personally made the first part of the file name as the year, and the second is names, in gender and age order, possibly ending with a one word description. I personally use something like this: 2007 Brent Teresa Trevor Austin.jpg
They’ll be chronologically sorted, no need to make folders. And this name format makes searches easy.

You can also make tags, but I won’t get into that here. Utilizing the file name is universal and foolproof. Tags can always be added later.

If you are incorporating digital images that already have a naming convention, or something like “DSC001932,” and you have many, download the free software Bulk Renamer, which does exactly what the name implies.

Also get Dupe Guru, a free program that will scan your collection and easily remove duplicates, an unnecessary step if you are using Google Photos.

Retouch the photos

Any photo taken before the digital age is going to have a lot of imperfections, which will become obvious when viewed on a large screen. Use Photoshop or a similar program to manually blur out the spots.

I suggest keeping sepia toned old black & white photos. Early color photos, especially from the 1970s, can be very muddy and red shifted, and will have to be adjusted for contrast, tint, and color. Note that sometimes tint and color correction take you in unexpected and undesirable results. This can drastically improve the quality of your image.

Photoshop has keyboard shortcuts for each of these to automatically fix them. Try making macros and keying them to your mouse or keyboard if they have that functionality.

As of this writing, AI programs are being developed that can intelligently add more pixels to old photos. Eventually/hopefully, this technology will be available as a batch function. When this happens, you will be one step ahead with digital copies ready to go!

Convert your videos

Repeat for videos. I suggest transferring them to mp4 format, h264 with high or variable high settings for near-universal compatibility and decent compression.

Old VHS tapes playing in a VCR/anything with an RCA Out (yellow/white cords or yellow/white/red:
You can order a USB converter from Amazon and play them on your PC. You will get what you pay for – the cheaper ones can have very screwy color conversion. I bought this well-reviewed product for $30 but returned it as it had a maddening psychedelic color band that came in and out intermittently on the screen on both color and black & white. I assume the more expensive ones, over the $100 range, will offer better results. But check reviews yourself – read through every last review on Amazon, as the results will wildly vary.
If you want the absolute best solution, get a TV Tuner installed in your PC. I had a Hauppauge from 2010. They are less expensive then the higher-end USB converters, but offer flawless, solid results. Installing a TV Tuner takes a little computer knowhow, so if you don’t have that, maybe pay Best Buy to do it. Tip: If you have the TV Tuner software version 7, which is available free on the Internet, and mount the image, you can download the paid version 8 for free from Hauppaugue’s site.

Old Film
This part could be professionally done – it’s a bit more urgent as old film and formats don’t last long. Chemicals break down over time. If you live in or near a large urban area, I suggest a local film converter with good reviews. You can also send them in to one of the large chains, but I personally did not trust the mail. Luckily, I still had an old recorder that I used to record ancient reel film that was literally breaking apart as I was recording it with a camcorder. Got it in the nick of time! But for the rest, I used Houston Video Transfer, who had an Emmy Award winning videographer that did fantastic work for a great price. They even color corrected some old overexposed beach footage. They take mail-ins. Call JoAnn at 713-446-5159.

If your old videos are very long, to make them more watchable, you can also edit the videos, add music, add transitions, using a video editor like Adobe Premiere. You can also create a lot of edited shorts from the long form videos. This part is creative and fun.

Beyond photos and videos

You can also scan letters, newspaper clippings, postcards, awards, business cards, and even include contact lists, geneaological records, along with screenshots of family trees from Ancestry.com.

If you are organizing reverse family trees, which Ancestry.com does not offer (presumably due to privacy concerns), try an app like Visio or, my favorite, SmartDraw, the cloud version of which is free for a week. It is insanely easy and feature-rich. It uses click and drag, auto-adds descendants, spouses, and siblings with the click of a button, and, most importantly, it repositions everything surrounding it, making edits a snap:

Family Tree Image

There is simply no reason not to use software to make your family tree. Sadly, it is expensive. The paid version is ~$600, which makes this unfeasible, especially if you only using this software for the family tree. Luckily, you can keep signing up for free accounts for as many times as you have extra email addresses (you will have to export your trees before your week expires each time), and free versions of the desktop software are available elsewhere on the Internet.

When you are done, you can convert to a pdf or png and take it to Kinko’s and make very detailed color family tree posters!

Getting them out on the Cloud and mailed thumb drives

Once completed, store the videos on a cloud service, such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Any reputable cloud storage will do. Google Drive is pretty cheap – $3 per month for 200 gigs. Google Photos stores any amount for free, but you will lose your naming convention. It’s not like photos take up a lot of space. I just use normal Google Drive for photos.

You can also store videos on Youtube, but keep in mind Youtube is phasing out “Private” videos later this year. I would think twice before putting anything on Youtube, though, because some persnickety relatives may balk at you “putting them on the Internet.”

Make a physical backup as well – pictures don’t take up a lot of memory, so they should all fit on one disc. You can create sharable links and send to friends and family. They will probably respond by sending you more photos, which is fantastic. You can also add contributors/collaborators to Google Drive to make your life easier.

For family members that do not enjoy high speed internet access, or are novices with cloud storage, you can also send them a thumb drive in a padded envelope (not a normal envelope). If you (like most people) have 2 sides of your family, put each family in a separate folder and send the appropriate folder.

For taxonomy, I used this folder system:
Family
Mother’s Side – Father’s Side
0-1930s – 1940s – 1950s – 1960s – 1970s – 1980s – 1990s – 2000s – 2010s – 2020s – Misc

(Each decade has photos of family members, with a few subfolders for weddings, etc)
The Misc folder has:
Ancestry – Cartoon faces (from the popular  Voilà AI Artis app (AndroidApple) – you get 3 days free, more than enough time to have some fun, you can even make headshot icons for your family tree)
Also: In Memoriam – Places – Text – Video

Enjoy your photos every day, conveniently and casually, forever

Once this is all done, you can also use a variety of free programs that make random pictures in your Pictures folder show up as a screensaver or wallpaper, changing every 10 seconds. And they are labeled with the date and name you provided earlier. Two I’ve tried that work well are Endless Slideshow Screensaver and John’s Background Switcher. Old people LOVE this. You can also get a newfangled digital photo frame, they’re pretty cheap, but i found the classic Google Home is ideal at ~$90, and isn’t limited by number of photos as they are seeded from Google Photos. The new Google Home is a bigger unit and wider screen, at over $200.

Conclusion

For many it will be a months-long or years long project, but the payoff is huge. I scanned over 10,000 photos and it was brutal, but such sweet satisfaction. My parents get to enjoy this while they are alive – they have many things to look at and talk about with their family. And on the sad day that they die, everything is taken care of – no need to sadly comb through old memories for what will seem to be an eternity, and never be able to name or recall precious old memories.

And once it’s done, it’s done. Highly recommended!

Finally, this is a huge undertaking and not everyone will have the time or expertise to do it efficiently. I can do it for you, however, but it will still cost you a lot, by the hour. Email me for details.

Good luck!

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