The Family Photo Gallery: Organising Thousands of Old Pictures

Most families have a shoebox full of photographs. A large part of it has already become faces without names.

This is a loss that happens quietly: the photograph is still there, still sharp, still well kept — but the last person who recognised the face in it has gone, and the photograph is now just paper.

Name them first, scan them later

The common mistake is to scan all 800 photographs first and plan to name them "later". Later never comes, and now you have 800 unnamed files instead of 800 unnamed pieces of paper.

Do it the other way round. Sit with the oldest person in the family holding a handful of photographs, and write the names down as they say them. Ten named photographs are worth more than a hundred scanned ones.

Link photographs to people, not only to albums

An album groups pictures by event. That is useful, but it does not answer the question people ask most often: "is there a photo of great-grandfather?"

When every photograph is linked to a member of the family tree, each person's profile gathers every picture ever uploaded of them — from wedding albums, from annual gatherings, from the photographs a cousin brought back from the village.

Organise by what people actually look for

• By event — weddings, feasts, festive days, funerals
• By place — the village house, the present house, the workplace
• By decade — when the exact date is unknown, the decade is enough

An uncertain date is better recorded as an estimate than left blank. "Around the 1970s" can be narrowed later; blank gives nobody a place to start.

Technical notes for old prints

• Scan at 1200 DPI for small prints; 600 DPI is enough for large ones
• Do not use "auto enhance" on an archive scan — keep the original scan and make corrections as a copy
• Scan the back of the photograph too if anything is written there; a pencil note on the back is often the only source of a date
• A photograph stuck to the glass of a frame should not be pulled off — take it to a conservator, or scan it through the glass

Storage quota and file size

Archive scans are large. Keep one full-resolution copy for the archive and one compressed copy for everyday viewing. Bear in mind that photo attachments in family chat take up the same storage — a collection scattered through conversations is often larger than the official gallery.