A few years back, I did a call-in radio show on WORT-FM.  At the very last moment when I was on the air, I got a question that I ended up taking off the air. The question was from someone who had inherited a large box of negatives. She had a really smart question and I couldn’t answer off the top of my head:

If I force a curved negative flat for scanning,
will I damage it?

I already know it’s unsafe to try to unroll a curled paper print. That’s a Very Bad Idea. because the emulsion layer can crack if you do that. You need to relax the paper backing first, but that’s a different quesiton.

To be honest, I just wasn’t sure if that was also true for film, so I asked my buddy David Benjamin for some guidance. He’s a photo archivist of the highest caliber and also one of my favorite people. It’s good to have friends who are smarter than me, don’t you think?

Here’s what David told me:

• It is safe to scan.

• It’s also OK to store curled negatives flat in envelopes for a short time with a weight on top. This sometimes relaxes film back to a flatter state.

• David has personally flattened out and even unrolled film and seen no visible damage.

• Getting it wet again by re-washing is waaay too dangerous. “Don’t even think about it!” he said.

Thanks, David!

—————
Looking for help before you tackle your big family photo project? My Joy of Organizing Photos CD is crammed with just about everything I can teach you about how to organize, preserve, scan and share your unique family photos. Click here to learn more. Here’s a link to my online store where I describe the scanners I use myself.

December 21, 1970. Elvis asks Nixon for a narc badge. True story, #NotTheOnion.

So I’ve known about animated gifs for a while, but I never tried to create one until now. Can’t imagine a better set of historic photos to animate than the bizarre chapter of the Nixon presidency when Elvis came by for a visit:

Elvis was traveling with some guns and his collection of police badges, and he decided that what he really wanted was a badge from the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs back in Washington. “The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him,” Priscilla Presley would write in her memoir, Elvis and Me. “With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.”

You can read more about this incident in Smithsonian Magazine

ACK!

I lost my phone last week, but I’m happy to report that

I did not lose a single photo.

I’m releived and grateful and, frankly, proud of myself.

Because I didn’t just think about doing it.

I actually pulled copies onto my laptop

I’m paying it forward by reminding you to

GET YOUR PHOTOS
OFF YOUR PHONE
BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

(Please share this far and wide)

So, I’m down to only a few hard copies of my “8 Blunders People Make When They Scan Photos” booklet, and I thought I’d make the next version a little more interesting to look at.

Here’s my first attempt, what do you think?

The booklet is 8.5 x 11 sheets folded over once.
It’s hard to see the edges of the cover since this is the digital design…

I realized this week that it’s getting close to 40 years since America celebrated its Bicentennial.

My small home town (technically a village) went all-in on the celebrations. We painted all the fire hydrants and mail boxes red, white and blue. Put up extra bunting in addition to the regular 4th of July bunting.

Here’s a picture of me in my parade-worthy outfit:

Are your ’76 Bicentennial photos trapped in a sticky magnetic album?   I invented a Photo Rescue Kit to help you rescue them.

I’m here to tell you that if you’re keeping those 1976 photos in a sticky magnetic album like this:

They are in what I call the “CHEMICAL SANDWICH OF DOOOOOM!”

Here’s a kit I invented to help you rescue them, just click the photo to learn what’s in it and how it can help you:

All the hand tools you need to rescue your photos from the Chemical Sandwich of Dooom!

It’s a separating tool, not a cutting tool.

~ 50% OFF Sale ends 4/30/15 ~

Click the daisies below to take advantage of this offer:

My entire Joy of Organizing Photos workshop — over 6 hours of recorded classes and Q&A with family archivists just like you — burned onto a CD and shipped directly to your door.
HALF PRICE SALE!
Enjoy a 50% discount when you purchase before May 1st, 2015.

Short Answer = I Don’t Know

.

I honestly don’t have any idea how many photos is enough to document a single event. For one, it depends on the nature of the event. Are we talking about a Pee Wee hockey game, or a wedding? Are we trying to document an event of national historical importance?

If there was an easy answer, this entire article would be a single number. Like 42.

I don’t even know how many photographs is enough to document a career. Enough so your biographer can fill the middle part of the book? And I sure as heck don’t know how many photos is “enough” to document a person’s entire life.

There’s no “one size fits all” answer to my question in this headline, but…

Frankly, it’s a question that doesn’t get asked enough. As in, almost never. Trying to answer this question — even if just in passing as you read this while waiting at the doctor’s office — will help you de-clutter your photo collection and focus only on the best ones. I hope it will also inspire you to take fewer and better photos.

Here are some suggestions, and one of them even includes a number…which I told you was impossible, I know. We’re gonna try it and see how it goes, OK?

1. No more than 10.

This rule mostly applies to photos you haven’t taken yet. I learned this when I was interviewed for an article in the Austin American-Statesman for Digital Savant. I can’t remember if it was Omar or Sarah who told me the rule but it’s basically this: Don’t take any more than 10 photos of any event. More than 10 is too much. Plus, if you’re taking more than 10 photos chances are you are not fully participating in the event itself. I can see this applying to a Pee Wee hockey game, or a single day on a special vacation. You get the idea.

You can also try to apply this rule to the keeping of inherited photos, but the era of over-photographing everything didn’t start until the 1970s so your chances of having too many ancestor photos are kind of slim. Slides are one obvious exception, and we’ll talk about those in #3, below.

2. Whatever fits.

This approach can be super helpful in the photo universe of paper and film, prints and negatives/slides. In that world, you can’t escape from the fact that they are taking up space in your house or apartment. Pick a maximum storage area and pare down accordingly. Maybe it’s one big box, maybe it’s a whole bookshelf. That part is up to you, but be sure to keep in mind that someone else is going to have to do something with them down the road. Make your photos a gift, not a burden!

In the universe of digital photographs, this rule is totally useless. We can easily pretend our photos aren’t taking up space, since they don’t take up physical space. I would wager a guess that folks with smartphones that have a decent camera might be more aware of the space photos take up. Let me know if that’s true for you in the comments.

3. My new idea — really more the beginning of an idea — involves the question: “How long of a slide show is enough?”

This occurred to me when I was creating a digital slideshow. You can tell it how long to spend on each image, but humans still need  about 8-10 seconds to “see” the photo properly. You can have the photos go by faster as a “speeding up time” effect, but no one can process what’s going on in photos that quickly.

So that’s definitely a kind of limit for digital photos that’s analogous to limiting your analog photos to a certain number of archival boxes.

Let’s say you just inherited 10 boxes of old family slides, and each box holds a carousel or tray with 80 images. That’s 800 images, times 10 seconds for each image is over two hours of slideshow. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like torture.

Think about it: How many minutes of slideshow would you be willing to willing to sit through for a single event or set of slides. An hour? Two hours? A full week?

Like I said, this is really just the beginning of an idea. I think it will be a useful framework for deciding what digital photos to keep and how many old photos you’re willing to scan.

Do you have other suggestions or strategies that have worked for you? Go ahead and share them in the comments.

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How to create a better file name than “0083423.TIFF”

for your scanned photos…but also better than

“aunt_marge_1964_retirement_marge+lisa+kenneth+unknown”

Don’t Overlook File Management

Just like you shouldn’t scan without a plan for where to store your new digital files, you shouldn’t scan without a plan for naming those files. It might seem like you can use the file name to describe everything that’s happening in a photo, but that’s asking the file name to do more than it should. Really, all a file name needs to do is be a unique ID for that single file that isn’t duplicated anywhere else.

Hierarchy Matters

No, I’m not trying to get in a political argument about the distribution of wealth in the United States. I’m talking about the hierarchy of nested folders on your computer or hard drive or remote server.

The full name of of any digital file includes the names of all the folders it’s nested under. In word processing programs, it’s called the File Path. If you want someone else to access those files on your computer, your best bet is to give them the whole file path.

Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Macintosh HD / Users / sallyj / Smith Scanning Project / Box 1 High School / filename.tiff

Tips for Naming Individual Files: “filename.tiff”

• To be ultra safe, never ever use spaces or special characters in your file names. [*@~^]
• Although file names are no longer restricted to a tiny number of characters, it’s still wise to be concise.
• Don’t get stuck in the trap of trying to explain everything about that photo with only the file name. It makes perfect sense to name a file with a combination of who and when, but think carefully about how many photos you have of that particular person. Also? Watch out for the group shots. They will make you crazy if you choose this path.

Should You Let Your Scanner Assign Numbers?

To be honest, I resisted this idea until I started doing large scanning projects. But now I think of the file name as a Photo ID Number, and I use a combination of prefixes and suffixes and date/time codes. It all depends on the project and how large it is.

I always use “scan” as the prefix for the file names of that first capture. Later, I might need to combine multiple scans or I might generate a PDF with OCR.  Those edited files will not have that “scan” prefix at all.

Macintosh HD / Users / sallyj / Smith Scanning Project / Box 1 High School / scan20150108_0058.tiff

2015 January 08 was the date of that scan. This particular file was the 58th scan created that day.

Bottom line: Don’t scan without a plan!

You’ll save yourself lots of headaches, I super duper pinky swear promise.

• Think about folder names.
• Think about how you’re going to nest some folders inside other folders.
• Choose your file naming strategy before you create a single TIFF file.
• Once you pick a file naming strategy, stick to it or be prepared to change existing file names.
• Remember to keep it as simple as you can.
• Use a soft pencil (like the No. 1 and Stabilo All in my Photo Rescue Kit)

You can’t scan yourself into a corner if you have a plan.

Wanna know which flatbed scanner under $100 I recommend most often?

Click here to see the Canon LiDE 220 on sale by multiple vendors on Amazon.com.

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ASK THE ARCHIVIST is real questions from regular family archivists just like you. Would you like to see your question here? Email me.

Hi Sally,

I happened to find your interesting blog by just poking around on the Internet. My question doesn’t fit neatly into one of the broader topics.

Within the past week I came into possession of a family history binder that was created in the late 1980s. The family member who created it died in 1996. The binder is composed of several hundred 8 1/2″ x 11″ pages that are typewritten text only, as well as pages that have typewritten text next to photographs that were pasted with a glue stick.

Since I need to return this binder to the family member who loaned it to me, I wanted to digitize it and then create a hard copy for myself.

What I have done so far is digitize the text-only pages by scanning them at 150 or 300 dpi as JPGs (depending on the degree of non-typewritten text that is detailed), but I’m unsure how to proceed with the mixed text / photo pages. I could scan these pages as TIFFs, but the file sizes would be very large. Or, I could just scan as a black & white document as I have the text-only pages, and then scan the pictures separately, then cut and paste them in – but that would be for dozens of pages.

So, what I’m looking for is the quickest, easiest and best way to scan these mixed text / photo pages an 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet at a time. Any thoughts on how to best proceed that would let me keep the binder and pages intact? If you could point me in the right direction, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks in advance for any help you could provide.

Robert M.
Knoxville, TN

MY PROPOSED SOLUTION

Robert,

As with all digitization projects, you’ll have to choose at the outset between “quickest/easiest” and “best quality.”

For photographs, “best” means uncompressed TIFF files with a resolution of 300 dpi @ 100%. That will mean more storage space than if you saved your scans as JPEGs, but with the price of external hard drives so low — this certainly isn’t the financial hardship it was just a few years ago.

For mostly text items like typed notes or printed newspapers and magazine articles “best” looks a little different. My current workflow for analog items like this is to generate a high resolution jpg file for the slideshow or scrapbook “image” of the clipping.

Then I generate an OCR’d PDF from that file. The OCR part means that the entire digital file is more than just a picture of a newspaper clipping — it’s also a keyword-searchable text document.

Very, very neat trick. The software I use for that is called OCRKit and it might only be available for Mac. If you’re working in a Windows environment, there might be additional options.

Your plan to make your own hard copy of the binder is an excellent one. Consider this copy to be your long term preservation plan for the family history binder. There is safety in numbers, of course, so be sure to add the data to your other family history databases and filing systems.

Here’s the hybrid approach I recommend for your digitization project:

• Scan each of the 8.5 x 11 sheets and save them as PDF files.
• If you want them to be keyword-searchable (note: this does not work on handwriting, only typed or printed text) then run an OCR program on those PDFs. Or, if you’re in a Mac environment, scan them as high resolution jpgs and then run an OCR program over it.

• Print a new hard copy of the binder so you have an additional copy that is not subject to digital deletion or being trapped on a dead drive.

• Store your new sheets in a binder that is not made out of vinyl. If you like to use sheet protectors, be sure they are made of an inert plastic like polypropylene. Avoid cheap office supply sheet protectors.

• Create a separate high res scan of any photograph you want to keep long term and/or reproduce as a photo. Save this file as an uncompressed TIFF.

• Create a high quality print of each photo by uploading the digital to the commercial printer of your choice. I like Shutterfly because they offer the option of printing a caption on the back of each print at no extra charge. Why they don’t emphasize this feature is beyond me…

• Use photo corners to attach each photo to its the corresponding sheet in the correct spot. You will be covering up the laser printer version of the same photo.

And, yes — I do recommend color scans for black and white photographs. Vintage prints are rarely black and white. There are gradations of color including some warm brown tones that you don’t want to lose.

Sincerely,

Sally J.
The Practical Archivist

Question for Practical Archivist Readers: Have you tackled a project like this? Do you have an alternate solution? Let us know by using the comments section. Anonymous comments are allowed. Spam, as always, is not.

Do you have a question about how to take care of your family treasures? Email me.
.

Since I started my Practical Archivist blog back in 2005, I’ve spent a lot of time encouraging and helping people to ditch their photo clutter.  So far, I’ve focused on the shoeboxes and envelopes and drawers filled with photo clutter from the 60s-70s-80s and 90s.

Now I’ve made it my goal to get you to ditch your *digital* photo clutter.

What is photo clutter? Postponed decisions.

It’s a common mistake to hold onto too many photos.

Our favorite and most cherished photographs have a value so far beyond measure that we tend to spread that love to all photographs as a format. I’s time recognize that not all photographs have equal long term value, and that your photo hoarding is not serving you well.

I created a video to show that there’s nothing magical about photo prints and it’s perfectly OK to toss the ones you don’t want to keep. To prove my point in a dramatic way that I admit is also a way to get your attention, I tore my discard  photo prints in front of a camera:

NOTE: There’s no need to actually rip up any prints, but if you take one of my in-person workshops I will make you rip a discard photo. Doing it once can help you break through the “must.keep.every.print” mindset. A much better plan for your discard photos is to send a print or two to someone in the photo. (And just to be crystal clear, I am not recommending angry or vengeful destruction. That’s a whole separate thing that I don’t need to be involved in.)

The good news about photo clutter (such as it is) is that the postponed decisions of photo clutter can actually work to your advantage — because it’s much easier to identify what’s worth keeping after you get some distance from the events shown in the photographs. Anything not worth keeping long term = clutter. Easy peasy.

Take a look at this snapshot of mine on the right. It shows how many high school era photos I purged in a single, quick pass through a huge box of photos. Even I was surprised by how much I could let go of in one try.

No agonizing, no hand wringing.

There were other photos in that box I eventually got rid of also, but I needed a little more time to make those selections.

Long story short: You’re holding onto oodles of images that aren’t adding anything to your current life or your ability to tell your life story in pictures. Just. Let. Them. Go.

You can do this with your digital photos, too. The good news is that it’s a heckuva lot easier to purge digital photos because you can do it from just about anywhere at the time that’s most convenient for you. Heck, with digital it’s even easier to ditch the bad shots right away just after you take them. No such thing as an “un-do” option with film cameras.

Yes, you have digital photo clutter.

In fact, I bet you have more photo clutter on your computer than you do in shoe boxes and drawers. The cost per gigabyte of digital storage keeps going down, and most of us have a camera with us at all times.

It might not take up space on a shelf or in your closet the same way as the prints versions do, but yes…you’ve been keeping digital photos you should have deleted. This Spring, I want you to focus on purging your digital photo clutter. DELETE, DELETE, DELETE: Delete the failed shots. Delete the blurry ones. Delete at least some of the shots that are so similar to each other they might as well be duplicates.

Why bother to purge your digital photos?

Here’s 3 reasons:

• 1. Save money. Although both the storage cost and creation cost are lower for digital, there is still a financial cost for digital hoarding. An external hard drive is less expensive that the cost of housing the same number of photos in archival boxes, but four hard drives is still more expensive than two. Ironically, since the cost of creating photos went down to near zero when digital replaced film, we take many many many more photos than we used to.
• 2. Save time. When you ditch photo clutter, you have a smaller data set to go through when you are searching. I’ve found the best way to search digital photos is using visual search, so you can save quite a bit of time. Computer searches are pretty quick, even for photo files. Keep enough digital photos that you need multiple hard drives and you really are talking about more time.
• 3. The unexamined life is not worth living. Wait, what? You can thank Socrates for that little nugget of a Truth Bomb. I include it here because de-cluttering photos gives you rewards that de-cluttering your garage or sock drawer just can’t provide. Use this project as a chance to reflect: Think about where you’ve been, the things you’d love to do again as well as some things you would do differently now. Pat yourself on the back if it’s deserved. This doesn’t have to be a formal process by any means. Just look at the photos of your past with today’s eyes.

Think of it as “Spring Cleaning”

You’ve probably already heard how important it is to have a realistic goal with spring cleaning projects like this one. At least, it’s important if you actually want to cross it off your list instead of starting a project that fizzles out. In light of that, I’m going to simplify this project for you by insisting on some tight parameters for what your goal should be.

For this Spring Cleaning project, I want you to focus on deleting the junk and ignore – not forever, just for now – the question of how you’re going to organize and arrange all of your keeper digital photos.

• 1. Delete bad/failed/duplicate shots in your camera or phone ASAP. Hit the garbage can icon on every missed or failed shot. Take an extra moment to select between 2 or 3 similar shots and ditch the ones that don’t make the cut. There’s only one excuse I’ll accept for not doing this right away, and that’s because you were too buy enjoying what was happening and you didn’t want to sit out while you deleted photos. Participating = good! My advice is to use small pockets of time to go through your recent photos and delete. Waiting at the dentist, for example. Or on your regular commute.Another approach is to do this purge right after you transfer your images from your camera or phone. Move them all at once, but set aside 10-15 minutes to reject the ones you don’t need.
• 2. Delete bad/failed/duplicate shots as a larger group on your computer or at the website of your online photo storage provider (like Flickr, Facebook or Snapfish). This gives you the advantage I talked about before, which is that some distance makes it easier to see what’s not worth keeping.
• 3. Purchase an external hard drive (XHD) just for your “keeper” photos. Buy something with more capacity than you need right now, so it can hold future photographs as well as any vintage family photos you might scan someday. Label the outside of the XHD something clear and obvious like “Family Photos” so even if your grandkids find it decades from now, they will know exactly what it is and why it’s important. Put only your keeper photos on here.

Remember: No matter which one you pick, focus on *delete*delete*delete* for now, and forget about arrangement for the time being. We can have a discussion about that later.