Apr 28, 2021 6 min read

Spending time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted people to embark on organization projects. 

And for those who have accumulated thousands of photos stored in photo albums and boxes, or on their phones, the prospect of organizing those photos might feel overwhelming – but necessary.

Nathan – Yeah thankfully we trained our staff to accomodate infux of photo clients. when lcokdown ahepened in March, our phot deparmteart boomed, incresae of 25% first month, when you are stuck at home, all they can do is look at ohpones, alubms, slidkes, films, all they’ve interited, that’s what we’re here for, we help them sort and organize, educaite on proper storage pracitecs, we give them the otools they can use down the orad, we offer virtual servies, zoom and screen share to help them organize photos, it’s been so successful for us, people can leave bins of photos and help them turn them into photo books and albems.

Usually just overwhelemd, don’t hknow where to start, we have systems we teach them for orgaiznation, start with broad sorting criteri, fileter down, sor thtourgh get rid of blurry photos, cut off heads, that usually helps, just keep what you .

We actaully part of o our scanning service we givet them pflash drive with digital scans and we go further, make digiatl books or photo books, get all those photos into books with just their favirores and imporatn life moments. We recommend having at least 3 copies of photos, including originals if possible. 

Most peoples goal is to get rid of origianl pohotso and digitize, we say one ofhte best backusp is the original photograph. If peopel are cropped out, there are photos they won’t want to keep, even after sorting process, they’ll have less physical photos, we reocmmend having 2 digital copeis, one on  a hard drive, on e on the cloud, like google dirve, off site sotrigea gocomes in handy when you lose the digital drive and a fire happens.

Honestly, all of the above, depends on the person, if you are perosn who wants ot organize photos by child, we recommend, sort from there, sort by one child, go chronooligclaly, or by event, it’s really honestly up to the clients, we hep with that decision making. 

It’s tough when you have  a lto

We implement ABC method, we’re members of photo managers, basically sorting into 3 caetroeis, A you want to keep and share, B aren’t most imortant but want to hold onto them, friends and events that don’t deverse an album, C are the ones you’ll throw away, cut off, blurry, we don’t want people to throw away of an important event, it got damged or ripped or torn we do photo restoration, we hired a photo tech to meet demand. WE’ve done photo restoration photos charred and burned and restored as close to the roiginl as we could get. 

There’s no right answer to that, we’ve had very large photo projects, they’ve decided to keep every single one, if you do have a lot, store them in room temp, if you have a lot, store in attic and basement, moisture levels fluctuate, keep thme in the same space you live in. living rooms, bed rooms, we’ve restored photos with mold and mildew, if you keep oroiginlas.

OUr biggest is ongoing, two years now, archiving a company’s comany history , taking boxes and boxes of photos, newsletters, newspapers, video press, VHS tapes of recorded news footage, it’s ongoing, we’re uncovinerg more and more, scanning, digitizing, uploading.  More and more people are coming uto us with VHS tapes, they only last about 10-15 years, starts to deteriote, the tape does. There’s othing we can do about it, if someone has tapes in addition to photos we convert those first just in case. 

DVDs also a dying form almost, better storing on hard drive and flash drive. Harder for senior phpoulation to grasp. 

A lot of cloud storage apps like Google photos and Drop box google drive have syncing feature, we recommend that you semi-regularly clear your phone of the photos in case something happens, gotta make it a point with yourself to organize phone photos, store on computer if you use i tunes with icloud, with android phone draga and drop, if you’re not ok with using cloud storage. Imporatn to keep in mind there’s a difference between a sycing app and a backup app, If you delete a photo, it’s gone. you want to look for a BACKUP app, backblaze is our favorite, that syncs all the new changes up to the cloud and not vice versa. Go back up. Google Drive, FOREVER is a great cloud service, it’s a lifetime guarantee, they also have.

WE are discoving, anyone can upload photos to a cloud account, hand us a box of photos, we take that one step further, we help you sort and organize so that you can keep and shaer. We emphaszie education, phelp peopel unlcok simplicity.

While safe at home during the pandemic, many people have been passing the time by sorting through old photo albums.

Angela Turner is a professional organizer who runs. She says it’s a great time to get started on a project like this.

“Myself and my daughter were going through some photos the other day. A lot of people are thinking about that right now – you’re trying to have quality time, so you’re going through some old memories.”

She says she has been busy lately helping customers convert their photos to digital form as it’s a great way to organize and protect them.

“We have thousands and thousands of digital photos that are spread all over the place on all of our devices, and so I have been helping people collect those pictures and put them into a central hub, and then backing them up so that they have access to them and can find them when they need to find the pictures.”

Turner says during this time she is able to work from home scanning pictures for clients, and communicating with them by phone or video call.

For those organizing their own photos, Turner says sort them based on how you would retreive them.

“If somebody said to you, ‘do you have that picture of uncle Larry from so and so’s wedding?’ What criteria would you use to go find that? Would you go and look under weddings or would you suspect to find it under uncle Larry?”

She is hopeful people will appreciate how important our family photos are.

“Photos might be one day the only thing we have left of our loved ones, so we want to really make sure we are protecting them and taking care of them.”