We're solidly into Analog Month, looking at some techniques for applying digital organization techniques to the items we have in the physical world. This often boils down to whether or not to digitize something. Once we convert a physical thing to a digital one, we've reduced it to a problem we've already solved. (That reminds me of one of my favorite jokes about mathematicians.)
After an introductory week and a rather long exploration of what to do about an overwhelming collection of papers and documents, this week is all about photos. The good news is that this process is similar to last week's material, except for a few considerations and modifications.
If you don't have any printed photos to manage or have few enough that they don't weigh you down psychologically or consume copious amounts of space in your home or garage, take a break this week and enjoy having less to worry about than others. Otherwise, read on!
Analog Week 3: Photos
Many of us are of the age where having an extensive collection of printed photos is at least a solid possibility. They might be your own or handed down from your parents. You may have a kid who's into vintage photography. (However, we have somewhat shockingly reached the point where "vintage" photography can include digital cameras from the early 2000's. Yikes.)
Unlike most papers and documents, we probably acquired every printed photo we own on purpose, even if we later changed our minds about wanting it. We went to the effort to capture the picture in the first place, and then we had it made into something we could put in an album, in a frame, or even on our refrigerator. It's something special.
Also, every photo print represents a purchase, however small. Even if we set aside sentimentality (which is hard enough), it's easy to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy: I must keep these because they represent so much time and money! And we know that if we don't keep them, there's almost certainly nobody else who will want them either unless we convince our children to take on the responsibility.
The Photo Question
Objectively, you have four options when considering a collection of printed photos (or even a single print, for that matter). Do you:
- No change: Keep only the physical copy
- Digital backup: Keep the physical print but also a digital copy
- Digital conversion: Throw out the physical copy after digitizing it
- Scorched earth: Throw out the physical copy without digitizing it
There's a special case, too, if your prints come primarily from digital photos you still have. In that case, your choices are limited to #2 and #3 above, accomplished by either keeping or throwing out the physical copy. But this is not a likely scenario unless you habitually print every digital photo you take.
Choosing whether and in what format to keep your photos likely depends on how much you trust technology and value your photos. For example, even if you (like me) want to keep everything digitally, you might have certain photos you want to keep in physical form just in case something happens to the digital copy. Or, the digital copy is your emergency backup, and the physical photo is where the real value is--sentimentally or otherwise.
I'm not here to tell you that you should keep all of your photos in digital form. Although I do so, it's a personal choice that isn't automatically better than the alternative. I like organizing digital things better than physical ones and trust my ability to keep good backups.
Instead, I'm here to introduce the process of digitizing your photos if you decide to do so.
Digitizing Photos
You have the same four basic options for photo digitization as we saw in last week's discussion about digitizing papers:
- Use a smartphone app (easy, cheap, accessible)
- Use a multifunction printer/scanner (less easy, not cheap)
- Use a dedicated document scanner (less easy, not cheap)
- Pay someone else to do it (easy with a caveat, definitely not cheap)
If you already use your smartphone for much of your digital photo management, going the smartphone app route can be a convenient way to bring your printed photos into an existing workflow. However, you should only consider this if your smartphone is relatively new and you know it has a decent built-in camera. Flagship iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones are good options, while something like an iPhone SE might not produce great results. You can always digitize a few photos and judge the outcome for yourself.
Large multifunction devices are also less likely to give ideal results, although they can still work. Photo scanning on such a device will likely require using the flatbed scanner near the top instead of an automatic document feeder to avoid damaging the photos.
Dedicated photo scanners will provide the best quality since they're purpose-built for the job. They often come with software that streamlines scanning photos and possible post-scan touch-ups.
Outsourcing this job to someone else is also perfectly reasonable. It's a well-known problem with well-established processes, and many individuals and small and large businesses have established themselves in that market. You still have to decide what to do with the resulting digital files provided upon completion, but this isn't quite as complex as doing so with digitized documents. Organizing digital photos, while potentially time-consuming, is mostly a matter of culling for quality, sorting into albums, and optionally tagging.
The main caveat is that printed photos usually have no "metadata" with them like digital images: no timestamps, no GPS location tags, nothing. You have to figure that out from context, or--if you're lucky--from a year, date, or event name written on the outside of an envelope or in an album. But that step is unique to each person and far beyond what I could address in a Tidy Bytes email.
If you're interested in diving deeper into digitizing photos, including some things to watch out for and tricks to streamline the process, I recommend checking out the "What To Do With All Those Photos" presentation by Rachel Jenkins of The Photo Archivers. Fair A session, but you can jump around to find what you like.
As always, if you have any questions, let me know, and I'll be more than happy to get into specifics with you.
Happy (analog) data-taming!