Welcoming Holiday Season with Photo Organizing Tips

The most exciting and busy time of the year is coming. While the holiday season is all about partying and having fun, it’s also one of the best times to bond with your family over mundane yet fun tasks like photo organizing. Family members are your best resource when it comes to sorting and figuring out what’s worth keeping and what isn’t, and the holidays are a natural time for everyone to come together and cherish reminiscing over old memories with a glass of wine.

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Getting started with the three-pile method
If you’re that responsible photo keeper sibling, the best way to tap your family as a resource over the Christmas vacation is to get started on your own first. Be the Mississippi genealogy department and consolidate all your photos (and home movies) onto the living room floor and dive into it.
We recommend dividing your photos into the “yes” and “no,” and “maybe” piles. The best way to do this is to make an initial first pass through your entire collection because the ones that are NOT likely to be discarded and the ones you won’t need at all are naturally going to stand out right away. Here’s a fairly helpful criterion to sort your piles:
YES

• Wedding albums
• High School pictures
• Professional portraits
• Events
• Heartfelt photos that trigger an important memory

NO

• Blur photos
• Bad angled landscape photos
• Cut off limbs
• Unclear photos
• Over or underexposed ones

MAYBE

• Any photo you don’t like, but can’t even throw away would like to keep
• Multiple photos from a single event that needs to be narrowed down
• Photos of unknown people and distant acquaintances
• Photos that are quite similar, but still different

There are multiple reasons you might put a photo into the “yes” pile over the “maybe” or “no” piles, and the hardest pile to sort through after getting done with your first pass. That’s where your family will pitch in!

Ask your family to come over with their photo books
The last thing you want to happen after putting so much time into organizing and consolidating your old family photos and video collection is for an auntie to find a stash of memorable photos you didn’t know you had. Ask your family to bring over all the albums they recovered through photo scanning service. Make sure they bring all the photos or videos lying around that they’d like you to organize. If they only have a few photo books, they could bring to Thanksgiving dinner, and you can sort those after stuffing yourselves with pumpkin pie. However, if they have huge bundles of your great-uncle’s scrapbooks or grandmother’s slides, have them over in time.

Families that organize photos together, last together.
Spend time organizing whatever you can before your family crashes for the holidays. Take the time to set aside any confusing photos you’ve run into, and then they’ll all be readily available to share with your loved ones as they arrive. We’re listing three common brick-walls that we’ve come across so far. Your family members will definitely help you sort them out.

• Illegible photo captions.
  
• Unidentified people.
• Unlabeled tapes.

Don’t forget to create new memories too
Organizing your oldest memories or sending the negatives from the 1960s for negative scanning services is a wonderful responsibility and a family activity to tackle around the holidays, but don’t get too indulged in this that you forget to take new photos and update your digital library! All the work you’re doing to organize your collection and keeping it safe shows your dedication and is the perfect indicator of how imperative it is to stay on the top of your digital library always. If you already have that in mind, you’re on the right track! In case, you are a little behind, here’s what you need to do:

• Get everything off your camera and phone right after the holiday.
• Create a separate Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukkah 2019 folder on your desktop and save all the contents.
• Mark your favorites right away and delete all the rest, blur, and not-so-good photos to free up space on your computer.

Your family will be impressed at how efficiently and quickly you are able to sort and share all the best holiday photos! They’ll be even more impressed with all the smart work you’ve been doing to collect and organize the old memories collection for the entire family.