Organizing Genealogy Photos: Part 2

The next step is scanning.  I already had a flatbed scanner, an Epson Perfection V300.  I had purchased this scanner a number of years before because I could scan slides as well as regular photos.  It has worked really well for me and I can scan to tiff or jpeg formats.  But it is not fast.  It actually seems to take longer to scan than when I first got it!  Since the Flip-Pal had recently come out, I though that smaller scanner would be great for all the snap shots I had.  The only thing is that the Flip-pal only scans to jpeg.

Usually I scan older or larger pictures with the Epson.  This way I am getting a really clean scan and I already have the image as a tiff.  This does take time but I can scan a few smaller pictures at a time and the scanner automatically finds the edges so there isn't a lot of cropping.  (I like to listen to different podcasts while doing the scanning since I don't have to think really hard about what I am doing and it makes the time go faster!)

I can scan wallet size or snapshots with the flip-pal and move much quicker through a stack.  I scanned over 300 pictures in just a few hours.  I do have rechargeable batteries since it does go through batteries.  After scanning each photo I store the digital file into a sort folder on my desktop for the next step.  Each photo does need to be cropped since the scan is of the entire glass, not just the picture.  I stack the printed photos so that they will be in the same order as the scanned images.  This does save some time when it comes to organizing the photos on my computer.

Tombstone Tuesday: Paternal Grandparents

Margaret L. and Raymond N. Green are buried in the Maple Lawn Cemetery in Boyne City, Michigan.   Margaret (aka Leta) Livingston was born in 1922 in Boyne City.  Raymond was born in 1919, also in Boyne City.  They married in 1939 and had two sons, one still living.  Raymond was a veteran of WWII and had a shoe repair business.  Margaret remarried in 1972 to Leon E Brooks who died in 2002.

Organizing Genealogy Photos: Part 1

some of the photo boxes plus the slide box

Organizing photos is actually pretty personal in that everyone has their own system.  I had been scrapping and scanning my own pictures since I had kids but there was a lot of pre-kids pictures that was just stashed in boxes. Then my mom gave me a ton of photos that she had from her mother and I needed a system.  I did search the internet but not a lot really seemed helpful.  Then I asked my father-in-law for his pictures because I knew they were just in boxes in the top of the closet and I wanted to discover that side of the family.  Now I really had a problem and needed to find a solution fast!

First off I don't have a lot of extra money so I knew I had to do all the scanning and organizing myself. So the first problem I had to tackle was where to put the pictures after I scanned them.  I just could not return them to the plastic bags or boxes or old albums since they would get more damaged that way.  I knew I needed to get archival boxes (and already had gotten 1 box for old slides) but how many?  At this point I decided that I needed to divide into four groups.  My parents are divorced so having their family pictures separate works and my mother-in-law had also died so that seemed to work okay as well.  So I purchased four regular size boxes for each family surname (Groenhof, Naber, Green, Vorce).  But I also had quite a few pictures that were bigger than the standard size picture box.  So I purchased three boxes for pictures up to size 12x9.  (The reason I went with three is because my side just didn't have a ton of large pictures so I could easily store them in one box.)  But I also had some really large pictures of my kids as well as heritage pictures that needed a bigger box. So I purchased one box (19.5 x 13) to hold all those really large pictures that would not be brought out much.

I wrote on the side of each archival box the size so I would know which box fit which picture and added initials of the family (G/N for my side).  Plus I labeled the four small boxes with the family name as well.  So now it was time to start scanning!