One library
The usual state of affairs is four partial collections: the current phone, an old laptop, a social media account, and a drawer of memory cards and prints. Pick one home, either a photo library app or a plain folder tree, and bring everything into it. Hunt down the strays first, including old phones, cameras, email attachments and the downloadable archive most social platforms let you request. Pictures that reached you through messaging apps are usually compressed copies, so ask the person who took them for the originals while they still have them.
A structure that survives
If you use folders, name them so they sort themselves, with the year and month first and a plain description after, such as 2024-07 Lake cabin. That structure works on any computer and will still make sense in thirty years. If you use a library app, let it sort by date and spend your effort on albums and on naming the faces it detects, since searching by person is the feature you will use most. Check that the app can export your originals with their dates intact, which is what keeps you from being locked in.
The cull
- Delete the obvious first: screenshots, receipts, blurred shots and accidental bursts.
- Pick the best one or two from each run of near-duplicates and delete the others.
- Mark the real keepers as favorites, aiming for roughly one in ten.
- Do it in short sessions, one month of photos at a time, working backward from the present.
Prints and negatives
Scan prints at 600 dots per inch, which allows a decent enlargement later, and scan negatives and slides at a much higher resolution or send them to a service. Write what you know, including names, place and year, into the file name or caption while someone who remembers is still around to ask. Set the file's date to the year the picture was taken, or every scan will sort under the day you scanned it.
Keeping them
A photo stored in one place is on loan. Keep the library in at least two places, one of them outside your home, and replace external drives about every five years, since they fail with age whether or not they are used. Print the best few dozen each year as a book or a box of prints, because paper needs no password.
Tip Open a handful of old photos from your backup once a year. A backup that has never been tested is a guess.
