It’s a question I get almost every day: can someone else really organize my photos? How???

Can Someone Else Really Organize My Photos for Me?

The answer is a resounding YES! In fact, we’ve been expertly organizing photo collections for over ten years. Here’s a shocker…the more disorganized and complex, the more we love to organize them, ideally from a physical mess into a digital collection!

How can we organize the photos if we don’t know who is in them?

Your first question is, how can someone else organize the photos if they don’t know who is in them? Part of our intake process for each new project is to learn who is in your immediate family and the people who are important to you. As we make our way through your collection, it’s easy for us to make family connections. We even create a personalized spreadsheet of important family dates that you might have forgotten about.

How can we put photos in order?

How can we put photos in order? Our preferred method of organizing your photos is in chronological order. It’s the way that most of us think of our lives. You are already used to seeing your photos in a chronological timeline on your phone. In order to add your older photos to your digital collection, we’ll be scanning and editing dates, so having photos in correct date order to start just makes everything else you’ll want to do with your photos much easier.

It may look like a mess to you, but we’re photo detectives, familiar with where the clues lie. We use all the info available to us, including dates on the backs and fronts of photos, the size and type of paper photos are printed on, the info on the lab envelopes the pictures are in, the content in the image itself, and even details like the width of a tie or the cars in the background. Using our sorting methods, we can organize thousands of photos into dated batches within just a few hours.

How do we know what photos are important to you?

How can we find the duds in your collection? When we sort as described above, the duplicates pair themselves up quickly. We separate the duplicates so you have one clean collection to enjoy (and for us to digitize).

If you opt for us to curate the collection, we can eliminate the blurry shots, the nondescript shots, the random beaches and zoo animals, and the one thousand photos you took of tropical flowers on your first trip to the islands. Read more about how we curate photo collections here.

Bottom line, photos of your favorite people are the gems, right? Let’s find those and make them easy to enjoy again.

How do we organize photo albums?

What about the albums? We meet with every client to decide how to handle each album. Basically you have three options:

1. If the album is in bad condition, we de-album the photos for scanning and long-term preservation. We can save a lot of space this way and make your photos more user-friendly.

2. If the album is meaningful and in good condition, we remove the photos one at a time and replace them back in the album.

3. If the album is precious as is, we digitize in place without destroying the album. Sometimes we will create a new print album that mirrors the original, so you can enjoy the story without further damaging the original or make copies for multiple family members

There’s more to the photo organizing process, including choosing the right archival storage cases for your organized photos. Believe it or not, it’s fun for us to start with an overwhelming collection and turn it into something that you’ll love to own and share, both in physical and digital form. It’s how we go from a mess to an organized, dated collection like this:

When you learn that expertly organizing thousands, or even tens of thousands, of your old photos can take us weeks, you might think differently about trying to get this done in a weekend or “when you have time.” What takes us days and weeks might take you months and years…and that’s just the organizing.

What you really want is a shareable collection that you can enjoy and pass down to your family, right? Once organized, we can digitize and teach you how to enjoy your digital photos.

So, yes! We really can organize your photos for you…and we love doing it. 🙂

Have questions? See more about our past photo organizing projects and products here. 

Excited about your project again but want to DIY it? You can. Check out the online course on photo organizing that I created just for you.