The Pain of Digitising My Family’s Photos, and How You Can Do It too.

Family history, heritage and genealogy has been a big interest of mine for as long as I can remember. Much of that probably stems from the rather large and complicated family structure I’m a part of; many siblings with many different parents. Much of that was before I was even born. I’m the ninth of eleven children my parents have had in total, so there is a lot of family history I was never around for. Our family photos and albums were central in being able to grasp the family backstory when I was young, and even now.

My appreciation of this lead me to take on a years-long project of digitising all of our family photos and albums. I’ve been compelled to ensure this wealth of family history, that we are very privileged to have, is kept safe, accessible, and has a life after death. I’m writing this guide in an effort to empower others to protect and pass on their family history too.

Note: Feel free to ask questions or point out inconsistencies. If you’re asking the question, others might be too. I will aim to update this article as questions arise.

Let’s dive in.

Stuffed in the shelves of my family home are about 15–20 nicely labelled photo albums, and another box or two of loose photographs that weren’t so nicely labelled or organised. In 2010, I made a start to seriously digitise these. This is my attempt at best describing the path I took so that you can see how that might apply to your own circumstances.

What to expect on the path ahead; the pain.

Digitising photos is pretty straight-forward if you have a scanner and computer. However, if you want to be serious about digitising large quantities for others to be able to navigate, understand, and use, then there’s a few things to be aware of:

• This is going to take quite some time. It took myself a good decade of doing some every so often to get photos from my father’s side done (I still have my mother’s boxes of photos digitised!). Don’t let that put you off though—I usually spent some days during the odd Christmas break doing this. It all depends how accessible photos and your gear is, and how much time you’re able to dedicate to it.
• There’s a number of repetitive tasks that aren’t going to be particularly fun, but that’s the nature of this process. There might be a number of different tricks to learn that could spend things up, but maintaining some order along the way means things will just take to get things right in the end. I’m going to be elaborating on what I did, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way.
• Technology can be a little complex. Not too much has changed for this process over the decade over which I was tackling this, but it has made things a lot easier for portion of sharing the work, and adding dates and context that can be layer on later with Google Photos.

Working with principles in mind.

Throughout this process, I had some vague principles in mind that informed my method. Treating it like an archival process was important to me, and in my mind that meant:

• Have a system. Given there’s a lot of content, a lot of repetition, and a lot of time going to be consumed, having a method will be your friend along the way. Be consistent with it, until it no longer makes sense to.
• Files in the end should be high-quality, but not ridiculously so. Enough to print bigger versions, or enough to zoom in on some details not really noticeable in the original printed forms. Choosing high-quality JPGs over archival-level TIFs was convincing enough and balanced the amount of storage the files would end up being.
• Maintain the original organisation I found the photos in as much as possible, but don’t fuss about the small things. This means when photo albums that have an order I should do my best to maintain that order in the files I end up with, so that relationship of photos and comments is kept, and the story told with the albums lives on to some degree. If a photo was missing, cropped a little strange, or slightly out of order, I figured this didn’t need to be remedied if it was going to slow things down. The bulk of the content was there and not all content was golden.
• Ensure contextual information stays with the files. To begin with this seemed a little hard to really make accessible, but in the end with something like Google Photos, written content has come through pretty well. Good file organisation and labelling comes in handy here.
• Enable others to contribute contextual information. At first this seemed hard to do, but the next point has really made this easier at the end of the digitisation process.
• Utilise new technology and software as you see fit for your goals. For me, this process was occurring when the social internet was taking hold and storage space was getting cheaper. Ensure that you keep an eye on new tricks that could make things a lot better for you and others. Google Photos, for example, has been fantastic for storage, shareability, and crowdsourcing missing context from family.

The digitisation process.

Setup.

For me this consisted of a few obvious and not so obvious things:

• Having a dedicated table and chair. This meant the setup was consistent and things didn’t need to be unpacked or packed up too often. The consistency of the space made it easy to jump into the repeating tasks, as the environment and task didn’t feel different to the last time it was done.
• Having table space. Photos and albums are bulky, and when you’re trying to keep organised with them space is really helpful. Especially if you’re able to churn through a lot of content in a sitting.
• Having a dedicated scanner. It’s pretty easy to get a printer-scanner all-in-one, but this seemed unnecessary, and would probably mean it would try to be used as a printer while doing the work. Standalone scanners however are sleek, easy to pack and store, and require only one cable to use—power and data in one. I was using a Canon LiDE 30 in the early years, but found in later years I could speed up the scanning ever so slightly (in sum it was a big difference) so bought a Canon LiDE 220 for about $200NZD.
• Having storage space and a backup system. By front-loading the scanning portion of the work, I would be needing a reasonable amount of storage space, on my computer and the cloud. Shouldn’t really be a problem these days, but it is something to pay attention to. I had Google Drive set up so that all my scans, as they were happening, would also back up to the cloud. Don’t want to waste any work if a hard drive died or computer was lost.
• Having a computer you’re familiar with. I spend all my time on Macs, so I’m rather bias in what I’m writing about how to do things with you computer. The simplicity of the scanning software and installing of drivers for the scanners I believe makes a difference, though it is something I would probably take for granted. You’re going to be using the computer a lot, so you should treat yourself to the most comfortable setup in both the physical and digital spaces.
• Having a laptop. If you’re like me and the content your scanning is not in your own home, then a laptop is suggested. Easier to travel with, and will do all you need.
• Having an external monitor and keyboard. I would argue this is really only important when it comes to the step of cropping and filing photos individually. You want to be able to look at photos on a big screen while cropping, and a comfortable keyboard for ease of use.
• Having a file system. How I went about this will be covered in the next step, but this is important for organisation and sanity.
• Having scan settings defined. It’s good to know what output you’re intending to have from the beginning. You won’t want to get half way and figure out you’ve been using the wrong setting the whole time. I suggest sticking to 600dpi, full colour, full scan-bed. Bump your scans to 1200dpi if you come across some tiny pictures, or you have something you really want to get the detail on.
• Having Adobe Photoshop. You’re going to be doing a lot of cropping of your scans, so have some software that does it well. I’m familiar with Photoshop enough to not have bothered with anything else, but you might find something more cost efficient and familiar to you.

Scanning.

Fortunately photo albums scanning can be done in logical chunks; one photo album at a time. Once my setup was set up, my rough scanning flow was something like this:

1. Have my scan-software’s destination folder empty.
2. Scan an album page, or group of photographs, at a time. Keep the order of photos understandable for when you, or someone else, is looking at the the scanned file.
3. Check the first scan came out appropriately.
4. Continue scanning until the album (or any group of photos you define as important) is finished.
5. Move the scan files to their own folder, labelled appropriately. I suggest giving albums a number to begin with and a name. For example, 021_Wedding 1986. I also filed these folders in a folder called The Roeske Collection, as I was going to be needing to separate albums from different locations. My mother’s albums are going to live in in The Edward Collection, for example.

Following this ensures that scans are organised as they are in the physical world, even before any photos are cropped, labelled and organised further. Doing this is a minimum to ensure that your photos are digitised somewhere, even if not easily accessible. I was able to do all the scanning work in the family home, and save all cropping and organising till when I was in my own home with that monitor and keyboard setup I mentioned earlier.

Tip: Photo albums are bulky and may need a page scanned multiple times to get all the content. See what you can do to remove the page from the binding to make this easier, and be sure to check the scans as you’re going.

What about scanning film negatives?

I’ve been either lucky or unlucky to not have gone through scanning negatives. Fairly confident that all photos we had in negatives were the ones printed and scanned. However, that may not be the case for others. If you’re looking to scan negatives, follow the same process above but you’d need the right kind of scanning set up to make it work. Everyday flatbed scanners don’t work as slides and negatives need to be backlit. The internet might be able to help you out a lot more than I can.

Cropping and organising.

By now you’ve hopefully got everything you can scanned, so you should just be left with folders full of scanned photos. These are in a pretty useless state, but nonetheless still great to have them all in some digital form (and backed up, because you back your files up, right?).

Folders of your album scans should look something like this.

The next step of cropping is to turn your scan files, which hold a number of images in one image, into seperate files per photo. Keep in mind, this cropping step can also take a chunk of time. You might get through about 100–200 photos in an evening if you’re up to it.

1. Create another folder inside the folder of scans you’re going to crop. I label this something like Cropped. This is so that things are still in the right place, and I’m not deleting the scanned files until I’m satisfied with the cropped files being how they should be.
2. Using your chosen software, eg. Photoshop, open up your first scan. Best to keep your sanity and crop images from one file at a time.
3. Using the Crop tool in Photoshop, crop and straighten the first image appropriately. Remember, you’re cropping in an order that the album presented itself. Left to right, top to bottom usually makes most sense.
4. When an image is cropped, use Save As to save the image in the Cropped folder you’ve already created. Ensure you’re saving as JPG, in max quality.
5. When saving, name the file with a number (I suggest starting with ‘001’, and keeping to the three digits is important for clarity), and add comments you found with the photo if you can in the file name. The content in the file name will appear again later in Google Photos! Sadly I didn’t find an easy way to utilise EXIF data in a way that was accessible.
6. Once saved, undo (Cmd+Z) the crop to be able to follow the same steps above for the next photo. I found this an easy few steps to follow for myself to avoid wasting time opening files over and over. You might find a way that works better for you.
7. Repeats steps above until the folder of scans has been gone through. At this point you should run through your folder to see if things have worked (might pay to check this earlier too).
8. If you’re satisfied that mistakes weren’t made, feel free to delete all the scans, so you’re only left with the Cropped folder. The cropped images can happily sit in your original folder for the album, and you can move the folder itself to another place so you know it’s done.
9. Move on to the next one!

Folders of cropped photos should look something like this.

At the end of this impressive dedication of time and energy, you should have folders and folders of single-file photos, nicely numbered and hopefully with some comments to add context and story.

Archiving in the cloud.

Now that the hard-yards are done, we can now look to sharing that great work. Backing up files to the cloud as you go means you can share the folders with other family members to peruse and giggle at. This is where I had left things a few years ago when I had done a lot of scanning of my father’s albums, with a bit more to go. However, turns out that wasn’t going to be the end of it.

Google Photos has since become a fantastic tool for archiving and crowdsourcing further context. Particularly important if you are wanting older generations to point out who is who, where people were, what they were doing, and when the photos were probably taken.

Using Google Photos

I usually recommend Google to people for it’s everythingness. My day-to-day tasks and files are there, my backups, and so on. It makes sense that I utilise the storage space I have with them for things like photos. After all, my digital photos end up there too. The added bonus here is that I can also share my storage quota with other Google accounts too. See. Everythingness.

Photo albums in Google Photos.

But the other important part of that is Google Photos. The Google Photos product itself has leant itself very nicely for storing, organising, dating, sharing, annotating, and geolocating all of my photos. Oh, and the use of facial recognition is impressive! To summarise what you can expect from uploading all your scanned family photos to Google Photos:

• Storing. As said above, Google Photos uses the storage you’re already paying for, and photo quality is preserved when you download photos.
• Organising. Albums are also used to organise your photos on Google Photos, if you want, so you can replicate the structure of your folders and real-life albums.
• Sharing. Whole albums can be shared with other Google users, or simply so that others can view them as they please. It is particularly useful to set up other family members with these albums in their own Google Photos, so they are easy to see amongst their own albums.
• Annotating. Add descriptions to the photos directly. Any notes you added in file names will also still be visible when you look at a photo’s details. If you’ve shared albums, others will be able to add comments themselves, which can in turn help with the next two features.
• Dating. The interface of Google Photos allows you to set times and dates of whole groups of photos, or photos one by one. This helps to keep all photos in chronological order across your whole timeline of photos that these photos will now sit in.
• Geolocating. Take advantage of geolocating photos on a map; input an address or landmark to build up that contextual information.
• Facial Recognition. Perhaps the most strangely powerful aspect of Google Photos is its ability to recognise and group faces, so that you can find other photos that have the same people in them. I am simply fascinated by it being able to show me a timeline of my father’s entire life, from the 1940s to today—including scanned photos and the natively digital ones.

A photo of me in Google Photos, to top it off.

Tip: After uploading folders of photos to Google Photos myself and seeing how it felt for a while, I decided to delete all the folders from the Google Drive itself—it was doubling up on the storage space. Feel comfortable in doing this yourself.

After taking this long journey, largely figuring out how to deal with the pain along the way, all of my photos are now in one place, easy to share with my family, and with any luck it’s able to last many lifetimes.

Hopefully this document is helpful in guiding you to reach the same end.