My siblings and I were born before digital photography became the dominant form of taking pictures, so many of our family photos are on physical prints and slides. In this post I’ll describe our family’s solution to consolidating the photos digitally.
My father took on a project a few years ago to scan and digitize the physical photos. He used a scanner that allowed him to scan the photos in bulk using a tray similar to photocopying machines. The result was 2 GB of data, approximately 1500 photos. Some of the photos had a timestamp printed on the card, but the rest of the dates were loosely estimated by my father based on memory.
Finding a technology solution for the family photo project was difficult. There were lots of photo apps available, but none allowed multiple people to “own” a photo. All the solutions allowed collaborators to contribute photos, but none would allow the contributors to delete or edit all photos in the album. We needed a solution that would allow all of us to contribute to the grooming process. On top of deleting duplicate or low quality photos, we also want to update the timestamps and add descriptions regarding the photo.
Our Solution: A Shared Account
Our solution was to create a new account to own the family albums. I shared the username and password with my parents and siblings, and we created several albums and added our personal accounts as collaborators. My father uploaded the digitized prints using the family account. Each individual added their existing digital photos to the shared album, which were then saved by the family account. This solution allowed us to conveniently add new photos from our personal accounts; we could also contribute to the digitized print sorting and cleanup by logging into the family account.
Here are the steps to take if you want to replicate our project:
- Digitize your physical photos. You could use a scanner, phone app, or send your photos to a service to do it for you.
- Create a new account on your service of choice, which will be called “family account” in future steps. Share the username and password with all family members.
- Upload the digitized photos to the family account. Note that depending on your photo service and number of photos, you may have to pay a fee for larger storage options.
- Create albums and add the individual family member accounts as collaborators. We created albums for each decade: 1990s, 2000s, etc.
- Log into the family account to edit or delete the digitized photos.
- Add new photos from individual family members accounts by adding them to the shared album.
One of the most valuable activities has been adding descriptions to the photos. Most photo services allow you to add a note or comment on the photo. One of our photos from 1998 has the description, “This is the first digital picture taken in the family. One of Dad’s classmates brought a digital camera to an event where he took this photo for us. The camera was a big hulking thing that needed a 3-inch floppy disk for storage.” By adding descriptions to the photos we can create a digital family log that will pass through the generations.
I hope you learned something from my family’s photo project. How does your family handle photo sharing? Any handy techniques to share for keeping your photos clean? Comment below or reach out on social media!
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