This week is all about photos. You can read about what to do with old photos here and how to pare down your digital photo collection here.

When I was back in Vancouver recently I asked my sister if her boyfriend was still using the old PC laptop we had given him. I wanted to pull some photos off of it that I hadn’t transferred over to my Mac when I got it four years ago.

Unfortunately the PC had died and taken my photos with it. We were leaving Vancouver a few days later and I didn’t think to remove the hard drive from the laptop to see if anything was salvageable.

So I’m now missing a chunk of photos, mostly from my honeymoon and 2007/2008. I have an inkling that some of them are in a half finished photo album on Shutterfly under my old email address. Some investigative work is needed.

More photos are now lost to hard drive crashes than fire and flood.

We need to start being diligent. We need to start backing up. Backing up isn’t for nerds or the ultra organized. Backing up is for everyone.

Store your digital photos in three places.

1. Current computer or laptop. Easy, right? You’ve already done this.
2. External hard drive or USB drive. We have a Mac Time Capsule. My laptop updates to it automatically using a software program called Time Machine. If you don’t have a lot of photos you could get an external USB drive and back them up to that manually.
3. Online. NOT FACEBOOK. If you are using Facebook as your photo back-up please stop. Facebook isn’t photo storage. They make no claim to keep your photos or store your photos or not lose your photos. Choose Flikr, Picasa or another online storage solution.

Back up. Regularly. Our Time Capsule automates the back up of files so that’s easy. My online storage isn’t automated and it means I need to remember to manually update my photos that are stored there. I am considering buying online storage with Apple to simplify things.

Anyone else have a digital photo storage system they can tell us about?

Yesterday was all about your old photos. Today: digital photos.

Let’s be clear: digital photos haven’t made life that much easier. Yes, it’s easy to share photos online but if you’re like me organizing and culling digital photos is a lot of work.

It’s too easy to take photos now. There was something handy about having to pay for prints and film. It made you selective.

Now we just snap, snap, snap, snap and tell ourselves we’ll pick the best from the bunch and delete the rest. When we get around to it.

My digital downsizing of photos is an ongoing project. I still have lots of work to do in my archive of photos. It’s too big a project for me to set a deadline for so when I find a bit of time, usually just after uploading new photos to my computer, I go through and delete digital photos.

The first rule of paring down digital photos: upload fewer photos.

I’m much better about deleting photos off of my camera before I upload them now. I have a point and shoot Canon Digital camera and it’s easy to look at the photos on it and delete the ones that are obviously not keepers right away.

Then, after I have uploaded my photos to my computer, I take another look at them and delete a few more.

Here’s my other tactic: I take fewer photos. One of the reasons I take fewer photos is that I no longer have an iPhone. I have to remember to bring my camera along with me to document events. The other reason is that I want to enjoy the moment instead of being behind a camera documenting it.

Compared to most parents my age I don’t have a lot of photos of my son. Compared to parents a generation ago, I have a lot of photos of my son.

Less can be more for childhood photos in the digital age. Can you imagine your child at the age of 30 trying to sort through 20,000 photos of her childhood? Yuck.

I also think that having photographic evidence of absolutely everything can impact story telling. Story telling is such an important part of family memories. Growing up in a large single parent household without a lot of money meant that from the age of five to fifteen (when I started buying disposable film cameras) I didn’t have a lot of photos taken of me. There are large gaps of no photos of Christmas or sporting events. That’s okay. When I’m with my siblings we can reminisce and tell stories about our odd childhood all evening. No photos needed.

So maybe I won’t have a video or 100 photos of my son’s first soccer/football goal. Maybe I’ll just have a photo of him in his uniform and he’ll know the story of the goal.

On our recent trip to the Dominican Republic I took roughly fifty photos which I then edited down to 20. I also took two short videos of Henry in a little musical number that they put on with the kids.

While viewing one of the videos, the one where he spotted Chris and I in the audience and started yelling “Mommy!” and trying to run off the stage, I accidentally deleted the video. I was really upset about this but have since realized it’s not a complete loss. When we were talking to family about the trip we got to tell them the story of Henry’s first time on stage. And how he saw us in the audience and wanted to run to us. Sure, they could have seen it on Facebook if I still had an account and hadn’t deleted the video. But telling the story was more fun than getting some likes and comments on it.

How do you manage your digital photo collection?

photo albums and box of loose photos

This week will be all about photos: culling, saving, storing and sharing. Today’s post is about what to do with your old photos.

Before paring down my hard copy photo collection my photos sat in a photo storage box and three photo albums. The box came with little index cards to separate and identify stacks of photos but at some point I gave up and they were all  jumbled up.

The photo albums were a set. They had plastic sleeves for three 4 x 6 photos to a page. The third photo album was only half full. I stopped doing much with photo albums once I had my own digital camera in 2002.

In some ways the digital age saved me on this project. I am turning 35 this year. My big photo milestones – baby, marriage – have been captured digitally and stored on a hard drive.

What I’m saying is: if you have a lot of hard copy photos paring them down will take some time. Don’t worry. My digital photos have also been a lot of work to pare down. So we’re even. More about digital photos later this week.

How to declutter hard copy photographs:

• Organize your photos in a timeline. I did mine in stacks like this:

Note:I also included some newspaper clippings and other paper mementos in my stacks. You can too if you’re scanning them or creating a storage system.

• Cull like crazy. I had to laugh at how many terrible photos I kept. Terrible photos that really had no significance and didn’t help tell a story. At the time it was really important to me to take a photo of the classroom we slept in at the 1993 BC Summer Games. But years later that photo told me nothing. It was the photos of my teammates and friends, laughing, racing, swimming in a lake, those were the ones I wanted to see again. Of course, terrible photos can also be charming and remind you of a different time. Just that fact that we have terrible photos says something. Nowadays bad photos are deleted before anyone can see them.
• Honour your past but don’t cling to it. What story do you want to tell your grandchildren, your children or your friends and relatives with these photos? It’s a morbid thought but thinking about a relative of mine going through my photos once I am gone has helped me let go of a lot of photos. Maybe a few dozen photos from your youth are enough. I know when I look through my mother’s photos from her childhood I enjoy how precious the photos are. There aren’t that many so each one is studied with care; the photo of her at the age of two on a ship headed to the far east and the one of her as a teenager hugging her father in their garden.
• Decide if you want to digitize. I recommend getting digital copies of old photos for many reasons. First, it’s a great way to share them. Who doesn’t enjoy getting an email with a blast from the past photo? When I was sorting my photos I took pictures of some of them and sent them to friends. Every friend emailed me back saying they’d really enjoyed the photo. Second, digitizing is a great way to store photos. I’m not one to worry about floods and fires too much but it’s nice to know that I have photos securely stored away digitally in a few spots. I’ll talk about digital photo storage options later this week.
• Scan or take photographs of your old photos. After putting in some time at the scanner I decided to pay to have my photos scanned. The service was quite reasonable and I am happy with the result. One thing I am not happy about is that the service still hasn’t sent me my photos back. There were a few odd challenges and a postal strike but really, no excuse. It’s been almost a year. Your other option is to photograph your photographs. Once you’ve set up your photo station it’s pretty quick. Here is a tutorial on how to photograph or scan old photos.
• Decide if you want to keep all of your hard copy photos. I didn’t. So I haven’t been too wrecked about the scanning service not getting my photos back to me. I do have a small collection of loose photos at the moment. They are mostly photos that family have printed off and given me. Yes, people still print photos. They are all copies of photos that I already have the digital file of. It’s okay to keep your photos or toss them once you have stored the digital copies in a few places for safekeeping.
• Display and share your old photos. Now that you’ve gone to the trouble of organizing, culling and scanning your photos give them their due. Display them in photo albums that are easily accessible in your home. Take the album with you the next time you visit a family member. If you’re going to keep things use them.

One of the reasons I decided I didn’t need most of my hard copy photos was that I wasn’t looking at them much. I have photos in frames around the house and we use our television as a photo album. We don’t have cable so our television is connected to an Apple TV box. I set up a photo album for the Apple TV and it rotates through the photos when the tv is on but nothing is playing. It’s been a great way to share photos with friends when they visit and remind Henry of his family in Canada.

Has anyone done something interesting with old photos? Mural? Decoupage? Turned them into postcards?