Tips on Organizing Your Parents' Pictures

It's a daunting task. The pile is 2- to 3-feet high, photos of all shapes, sizes and quality spilling over each other in shoe boxes that are in various states of disrepair.

Pictures, undated, of course, offering few clues as to what era they were taken, let alone any clues as to those who inhabit the photos.

You'd like to take on the challenge, to organize yours and your parents' history, to at least get the tangle of Polaroids, slides and snapshots into something that resembles order.

In this day and age of hands-on scrapbooking, nearly everyone is aware of the limitations and dangers of placing your photos in traditional photo albums. Those magnetized pages where the snapshot is practically glued to the page? Forget them, throw them out! At the very least you might consider reusing them for children's artwork that might otherwise get recycled (if you have the room). But what about the slip-in (pocket) albums, where each photo is safe from all others, no falling out, no overlaps, no glue? A better choice, but still not the best option.

The best place for your photos, old and new, are either placed in archival safe (acid and lignen free) storage boxes (with the hopes that one day each photo will find a home). Or in a scrapbook of archival quality (with pages that are acid and lignen free). The brand of choice for many scrapbookers is Creative Memories, however, CM can be costly, and there are many suitable brands available to consumers.

Before any active storage or scrapbooking can take place, you'll need to separate the photos by way of either year/event/person/place or something to that effect. Get a comfortable chair, because this process is bound to take a while. You might get lucky with pencil or pen date scratches on the back of some of the photos. Separate those out first. The ones that remain, study carefully. You may have an entire slew of similar photos, and the top one has already been dated and separated out.

For photos that have no date, become a detective... "How old does Mom look in this photo? She has the same style/color hair as in this photo dated... 1989..." "At what house did we have that ugly green shag?"

Most photos will hold some clue as to their identity, whether it's the landscape, the furniture, the model year of a car, perhaps, there is an unmistakable event - like a fire- when new carpeting or fresh paint was applied, that can cleave certain pictures into "before" and "after" categories.

Don't worry about tracking down the exact year a photo was taken. It is extremely unlikely that precise information will need to be available to anyone. Organize in half decades, or even decades if necessary.

When you are satisfied with your arrangement, use an archival safe pencil to write the date and other important information on the back (names of people, location, event, etc) - use archival safe dividers (when using boxes) to separate your photos. Remember that Polaroids should never be cut, or they will be ruined. They can, luckily, be scanned!

Some of the photos may be unrecognizable as to any sort of clue, in this case, ask a relative for information, and if you are completely stuck and the picture appears worthless to everyone, throw it out. There are too many items in this world holding us down. Do not keep hold of a photo absolutely no one gets pleasure from viewing it.

Some photos, especially if they are your parents' or grandparents' may be worn and brittle. In this case, it is a good idea to use a scanner to capture them before they are ruined completely. Once scanned, the photo may be printed by you, or by traditional developers. This is a good suggestion if the photo is particularly meaningful to keep a digital copy that can be shared with everyone.

Once that pile of pictures is organized, you'll feel confident you can tackle any number of projects with them. Your scanned pictures may be used for multiple projects, another plus. If you are a scrapbooker (or just placing photos into regular albums) it will be a huge benefit to have all of these family photos categorized.