Getting started!

Okay, it's time to get serious.  If I don't get started with digitizing and archiving the mountain of family photos I am hording, I won't live long enough to get through them.  Well, it's likely I won't anyway just because of the sheer number!

Not mine but a better organized approximation of the picture jumble I need to get through.

So my plan is to use the workflow from the book, "Declutter Your Photo Life", starting with the Gather phase.  

See the post on workshop resources for information about purchasing this book.

I have decided to separate the slides from the other photo types partly because my father began our archive with slides and partly because I recognize that they are likely to be the highest quality pictures to save. One of my challenges is that my father scanned many, many but never disposed of them. I learned that slides should be scanned at a resolution of 1000 ppi.  Because he scanned them with a film scanner with much lower resolution, I want to check to see if any of the pictures should be rescanned at the higher resolution so that I can enlarge and print them.  I have at least one shoebox sized plastic box with his slides to go through and it's likely there are others that are underneath the piles.  Sigh.

Deciding on an online photo service for my archive

I have read several reviews that compare the features of different services, including this one from 2023.  I am currently using Google Photos.  There are some features I really like about it including the ease of transferring pictures from my phone, the shared albums and the timeline that makes it easy to locate pictures according to the year they were taken.  It also features facial recognition for organizing and a robust search tool.  Since I exceeded the storage available at the free tier (5 GB) last year I committed to paying for 100 GB.  The cost is nominal at $29.99 /year but the 100 GB includes storage for my Gmail and a Google drive that I have used for both personal and work purposes.  First of all, I believe that at the time I subscribed it was $19.99 per year.  I could be wrong about that but the cost inevitably goes up.  Since I also have to monitor the storage used for mail and other things, it is a challenge to add the photo storage on top of that.  I really want to monitor and minimize the costs for storage.  Google also has the advantage of  longevity.  It's important to consider that if I choose another service to reduce the cost and it goes out of business in a couple of years, I could lose all the work I have put in organizing photos.

After some reading and consideration of these factors, I have decided to set my archive up in Flickr.  I even did a trial to see how difficult it was to upload and organize pictures.  It was very straightforward and the free subscription will allow me to upload 1000 pictures before I have to commit to a paid subscription.  The paid subscription is $72/year and it allows unlimited photos so it will cost less than my current Google account and the cost will not be dependent on the number of photos.  A survey of the site assures me that it is used by many professional photographers and the album and organizing features are quite comparable to those of Google Photos.  I haven't explored facial recognition so I don't know whether I will forfeit that feature or not. I have also found that it is possible to label each photo with the privacy control to allow it to be "public", "private - friends" or "private - family", a feature I will really appreciate since I want to be able to make pictures of my young grandchildren available to family but no one else. In addition, I have the ability to limit who can search for, share, download and use my photos.  In the future if I choose to, I can share select photos with a Creative Commons license that indicates how I want the pictures used and who should get credit for them.  My librarian's heart loves this!

Here is a link to my first efforts on Flickr.

Thanks for sharing this part of the journey!