My Family Photo Scanning Project

Not to freak anyone out but…I can pretty much recognize every member of my extended family as a baby.

Let me explain:

As some of you may remember, my grandmother passed away in August. So one day I was over at my grandparent’s house beginning the cleaning process and I discovered a drawer of photos, most of which I had never seen before. That day I had a great idea: the family photo scanning project. I should scan all of those photos so we have digital copies of them so we can have them forever and I’ll have them all titled with the names of those in them for future generations but also for our family now. My sister & I thought this would be a great idea! We mentioned the idea to my aunt & she thought it would be great too!

She took us as suckers.

My sister & I thought there were just two drawers of loose photos. But nooooo. There were photos everywhere; in multiple rooms, in multiple dressers, in other pieces of furniture in the house. Photos were everywhere!! Some more recent and some dating back to when my grandparents were in high school. My sister & I were collecting all of the photos we were finding to take them back to our house when my dad stops by on his way home to help us & proceeds to look at our two boxes full of photos and says “Oh. That’s not all of them.”

What? Come again? You said there’s more? How many more?

Oh…a lot more.

My sister and I went home with more photos than we could count feeling slightly defeated and definitely overwhelmed with the amount of photos.

How We Organized ALL of the Family Photos:

Fast forward to the next day & my sis & I start organizing all of the photos where we realized how many photos we really had.

ALL of the photos we brought home for the family photo scanning project — The living room was an absolute disaster while we organized

We organized them into events (Easter 2004, Christmas 1983, Family Pool Party, —‘s Birthday Party, —‘s & —‘s Wedding) or by nuclear family (a couple and their dependent children). From there, I put all of the events in a basket & each family in their own basket(s) to keep them all organized. I’m not going to call out which family had the most baskets but one of them had 3 baskets worth of photos. We now know who the favorites are in this family. Hahaha I ended up with roughly 9 baskets full (for perspective, the baskets are 9.5in x 7in).

How Long This Family Photo Project Took:

In my head, scanning was going to go pretty quickly. The reality: it took anywhere from 1 minute to 6 minutes depending on the size of the photo. I had a super glamorous set up so I could scan: the scanner & my laptop on the ironing board in front of the couch because that was the only way to scan allll of the photos without destroying my back, shoulders, & neck. If only I had a photo of that set up.

It took me anywhere from 1-3 days per basket. I celebrated & rejoiced if I finished a basket in a day. It was a big deal because the majority of those baskets were FULL!

It took me 3 weeks to scan all of the photos in the first batch. 3 weeks. For the first batch. That’s how many photos there were.

I was rejoicing because I was done scanning & was getting ready to put the photos into storage containers so they would be safe & organized. The family photo scanning project was done!

Then I went back to my grandparent’s house where I discovered more photos. Every time we went over there to clean, I kept coming home with more photos. I finally said that I had to stop coming over because I kept finding more photos every time. Our dining room was completely flooded and overrun by photos and baskets and picture frames.

Box labelled "Framed Photographs" as part of my family photo scanning project — “Meredith! Come here! Look what I found.”, they said. That sentence was never good for me. I kept finding more & more pictures.

The second batch of photos were older & I knew that they would each need to be labeled so I called in reinforcements. My cousin & I went through each photo one by one where I would identify each person in the photos & she would write the name(s) down. We would cut out the names and tape them to the back of the photos. We knocked this out in two days!

At this point, I was debating on whether or not I should even scan those photos because I didn’t know if anyone would care or if I could handle multiple more days of scanning. I mentioned this to my cousin & she said, “You remember the other day when you told me “I could give you an answer but I don’t think you’re gonna like it”? Well, right back at ya.” She was right. I was going to regret it if I didn’t scan those photos so I did because they were photos of my dad, aunts, uncles, & grandparents when they were younger.